Sherlock Holmes - Jeu d'ombres : 3/10
Sherlock Holmes has always been known as the sharpest-thinking man of his time. Until the day when the formidable Professor James Moriarty, a criminal with intellectual power comparable to that of the famous detective, appears on the scene…
I enjoyed the first part, which was honest entertainment. Not very subtle, but nice. This one is just heavy. Guy Ritchie has turned on the special effects machine and serves them to us in twelve-packs: slow motion, 3D inlays, sound effects, completely incomprehensible and unjustified camera movements...
In any case, I don't see how anything can be justified, given the emptiness of the story. I know very little about the world of Sherlock Holmes, having only read The Hound of the Baskervilles, but I'm convinced that there's more to it than that, that the investigations aren't crammed into 15 pages between two fights.
In the film, Moriarty has no stature whatsoever; he's content to be clever with his chess pieces and to blab a little (but no punchlines with nanardesque potential :/). I find it hard to imagine Sherlock Holmes' nemesis like that. I tend to judge (super)heroes by their enemies, and with this cardboard Professor Moriarty, Sherlock's in trouble.
The attempt at queerbaiting with Holmes and Watson is shitty. I think it should have been played through to the end or left out. As for the actors, Jude Law and Rachel McAdams are there for the dimple quota, Jared Harris is pretty bad and Robert Downey Jr. is a ham, as usual.
Visually, it's often nauseating, as a result of the aforementioned effects. The rest of the time, when the camera is steady enough for us to see something, it's not too bad. Old-fashioned colors, nice scenery, nothing extraordinary, but it works. At least, that's what I expected from a period blockbuster. The 3D computer graphics artists had a lot of fun with the scene in the woods; it's a shame they used a Windows Movie Maker flame preset for the big gun shot, but the rest of the VFX was pretty good.
The direction is bad, the fights are a mix of Matrix and Walker Texas Ranger. There are plenty of easy, totally clichéd shots, such as Moriarty slamming a chess piece on the board with dramatic music and the piece in the foreground taking up the whole screen. So much for subtlety. All that was missing was the demonic laugh and it would have made a great shot for an episode of Inspector Gadget. Occasionally, there are some nice shots, but they're drowned out by pretentious tracking shots and long shots, and they're not enough to make you forget them.
I have no recollection of the music, if there was any, just the sound effects during slow-motion shots. It was badly done, uninteresting and gave me a headache.
Lastly, the thing that irritated me most about the film: Sherlock's “ moments of genius ”. What were they thinking, staging them with a mixture of flashback, flashforward and slow motion? It completely breaks the rhythm of the scenes, isn't necessarily understandable at first, and becomes downright ridiculous in the last scene with Moriarty when coupled with a voice-over.
This deserves a 2, I'll give it a 3 because I like to see Robert Downey Jr. hamming it up :D
