Defines bad movie in the post-modern era

Rating: 1/10 (4 March 2014)

A Game of Shadows: In an era when our most popular films are really little more than roller-coaster rides through comic book worlds, can anyone actually make a bad film, with standards so low. Well - you can make this film, I guess. "A Game of Shadows" is truly awful. I admit I even watched it twice, because the first time through I couldn't get any sense of what the story was all about. The second time around, a number of narrative threads did seems to run through the film, eventually tied together (rather arbitrarily) at the end. But I realized that the story (or stories) here merely form a kind of scarecrow on which director Ritchie could hang set-piece action sequences, camera tricks and CGI wizardry, while the actors mugged like children in a bad school play about someone or other they called "Sherlock Holmes," for no other reason than they had heard the name while running around a TV set with an old movie playing on it.
Childishly campy, visually ugly (that mind-numbing slo-mo - stop it!), badly written, and horribly over-acted; of course it made millions. That doesn't stop it from being a bad film.
Note: There are currently four series of films attempting to revise the canon of Conan Doyle's brilliant Victorian detective for the 21st Century. One from the UK (Sherlock, for TV), one from the US (Elementary, for TV), one from Russia (Sherlock Homes, for TV), and the internationally produced films of Guy Ritchie, starring Robert Downey. Notably, each involves a radical re-envisioning of the character and his place in the world. We may have reached a point in history when filmmakers simply cannot give us the Great Detective as he was imagined by Doyle and played (with variations) throughout the 20th Century. Rating the 4 series: Sherlock Holmes (Russia): 9 of 10, with strong stories and a believably proletarian nerd Holmes. Sherlock (UK): 6 of 10; excellent first season has been betrayed by Steven Moffat's flashy showmanship until the stories are incoherent now (Season 3), the characters no longer likable, the focus almost completely lost. Elementary (US): 4 of 10; the redefined Holmes, a nervous, unsympathetic recovering drug addict, is not without interest, and any show with Lucy Liu in it gets the benefit of her quiet but charismatic presence and talent. But basically, this is just a routine American police procedural with a gimmick. I doubt that Hollywood can do anything else. Sherlock Holmes (Ritchie/Downey): 1 of 10. This series lacks any coherence in its stories or continuity. It's just a series of set-pieces with running around, fist fights, explosions, and campy jokes.