Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
December 16, 2011 in theaters
The 2011 sequel leans harder into the action-mystery hybrid of its predecessor, escalating the stakes from Victorian cult leader to a geopolitical chess match against Holmes's greatest intellectual equal. Jared Harris plays Professor Moriarty as a cold, calculating strategist whose ambitions extend beyond crime into the machinery of war itself. The film opens with a cascade of assassination plots that Holmes must piece together while Watson prepares for his wedding, threading the personal stakes through the international conspiracy. Ritchie's direction is even more frenetic this time, with a forest chase staged as a bullet-time chess match and a climactic confrontation that mirrors the intellectual duel between the two leads. Noomi Rapace joins as a gypsy fortune-teller, and Stephen Fry appears as Mycroft Holmes, adding to the ensemble without overcrowding. The sequel improves on the first film's structure by giving Holmes a villain worthy of his intellect.
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TRAILER
QUOTE
"Chess. It's a game of strategy. You study the board, you anticipate your opponent's moves, and you plan accordingly."
-- Sherlock Holmes
DID YOU KNOW?
The forest chase sequence was filmed using slow-motion cameras at 1,000 frames per second to achieve the bullet-time effect during the artillery bombardment.
THE VERDICT
Synthesized from published reviews
A Game of Shadows improves on its predecessor by giving Holmes a true intellectual equal. Jared Harris's Moriarty is the best thing in the film, cold and precise where Downey is chaotic. The plot occasionally loses coherence under Ritchie's maximalist direction, but the climactic chess sequence is a satisfying culmination of the intellectual duel the whole franchise had been building toward.
GALLERY
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