Not about Sherlock Holmes

Rating: 1/10 (19 June 2012)

I think Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law would make a very good pair for a Sherlock Holmes movie, but unfortunately this movie is nothing but action and explosions - i.e, it is a movie about with two main characters named "Holmes" and "Watson" but there ends the resemblance with Arthur Conan Doyle's work.
If you are looking for a video game style shoot-em-up movie then this is for you. If you know who Basil Rathbone is and you are in the mood for that, by all means avoid "A Game of Shadows" It is visually interesting but absolutely sucks as a Holmes movie.
There are some good, if small, efforts to build the credibility of Downey Jr as a Holmes character but they are even too extreme for Doyle's style. There is no sense of class from Downey Jr in this role - it's as though he's remaking a Victorian version of "Iron Man" and it's an awful portrayal of Holmes. He appears to possess not just a superhuman intellect, which he should, but superhuman hearing and vision. Um, no. Apparently this Holmes is also a prizefighter - huh?
Finally, the cinematography in the numerous action scenes (making up more than half of the movie with visually interesting but utterly mindless fluff) is bizarre. There is a hyper-focus on minutia such as extreme closeups of bullets flying by characters in slow motion. Numerous explosions are painstakingly displayed in three dimensions, crawling slowly across the screen in super slo-mo. It's like examining a hair on a fly's eye from every possible angle . . . for 60 minutes non-stop.
If you are interested in a modern interpretation of Sherlock Holmes that Doyle would recognize, continue looking (check out the BBC's version?)