Improved round, but there's a better boxer

Rating: 7/10 (9 January 2012)

Guy Ritchie's first go around with Sherlock Holmes felt a lot more like "Snatch 2" with pigs, slow mo punching and dank leaky interiors, but here he has genuinely improved. Despite the bore inducing overdose of patented Ritchie camera shutter ramping and slow motion, this is actually sorta kinda qualified to be a Sherlock story.
Modeled hazily on The Final Problem, there's more mental gymnastics with Moriarity and less British pit boxing. Nice recovery Guy.
What bothers me the most here, is the inclusion of too many guns blazing scenes - a near contractual requirement for any director working with 80s fossil, producer Joel Silver. John McTiernan joked about just this point working with Silver when making Arnie's Predator. His solution, or Flip Off to Silver, was having Bill Duke fire the "Painless" mini-gun surrounded by the other commandos dumping lead into the jungle - and hitting nothing. In Die Hard he had the terrorists do the same thing shooting glass. But that is another story. No, I have nothing against guns, but Sherlock is not an action hero, he is a heroine addicted supercomputer and he wins the day with his mind and eye, not running from mortars.
Overall it is money well spent if you want to escape. Though the movie is so dense with quick cutting for more than two hours I don't really remember anything from the first half of the film at all. While Downy Jr. enjoys playing our dear detective and Jude Law perfectly at home as Watson, in the meantime Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman have done better with their interpretations on BBC's Sherlock. How about that? Guy Ritchie beaten out by a TV show. You don't even need slow motion to see the knockout blow from those two show how it's done.
It is nice to see Noomi Rapace in there. Hooray for life after Dragons and Tattoos.