Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows amounts to 129 minutes of missing Steven Moffat, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Martin Freeman.  Where the BBC’s brilliant “Sherlock” series of telefilms offers puzzling plots, delightful verbal interplay, and a sly (and often ribald) sense of humor, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is mostly just loud.  Where “Sherlock” gives us Moriarty as a comic, twisted genius, Game of Shadows lazily offers us Moriarty as just another Bond villain.  Where “Sherlock”’s unique visual style amuses and intrigues us, Game of Shadows only makes us wonder exactly how much cocaine director Guy Ritchie blew through while shooting and editing this film.

Here’s the story: it’s about a year since the events of the first film, Sherlock Holmes.  Holmes and Watson reunite to bring the nefarious Professor Moriarty to justice after the villain tries to have Dr. & Mrs. Watson killed for no apparent reason.  Lots of stuff blows up.  Noomi Rapace appears because she was hot after The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire and it seems like a good career move.  More stuff blows up, there are some fistfights, and a bunch of people get shot, all in slow motion.  The Bond villain reveals his Bond villainesque plan, and his henchman reveals a disappointing lack of sterling silver dental work.  More ‘splosions and fights and shooting, and even more slo-mo.  We reflect that Robert Downey, Jr. doesn’t look remotely like an otter.  The film draws to an utterly unsurprising conclusion.  The End.  Next.

Hey, kudos to Guy Ritchie for (a) achieving his unique and singular vision, and (b) finding a studio to underwrite his coke habit.  But Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows just isn’t much fun.  It needs more wit.  It needs more style.  Aww, the heck with it: it needs Moffat, Cumberbatch, and Freeman.  They own the franchise now. 

Prometheus

I have mixed feelings about Prometheus.  I love its look, its feel, its ambition.  I appreciate its casting of serious, high-quality actors.  However, its screenplay needed a few more passes before it was ready to go into production.

Prometheus weds a big budget to a high concept.  Its sets are magnificent, its world dazzling.  I saw this film in 3-D, mostly because an old friend of mine was one of the camera techs, and the effects were more immersive than distracting.  Add the casting of proven performers like Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Michael Fassbender, and Guy Pearce, and this looks and feels like elite work.  The concept, well, we’re talking about finding the origin of human life on Earth, and the film’s characters have the kind of existential questions director Ridley Scott tackled in his classic Blade Runner: “Where do we come from?  Why are we here?  Why can’t we have more time?”  While we have mixed feelings about the answers the film provides or withholds, we have to credit the production with going after them.

Prometheus gets so many things right that it’s a shame the picture can’t keep our suspension of disbelief alive.  As the audience in a science fiction movie, we walk in willing to believe in technologies that defy the known laws of physics.  We can’t, however, believe in people that don’t act like people or in organisms that can, say, grow without eating.

One of the great things about Ridley Scott’s Alien was that it took things a while to get going.  We go to know the crew of the Nostromo not by having them stand up and recite their bios, but just by following them around for a while.  Once we knew them, we cared about them and believed in their story.  Prometheus gives us an implausible roll call followed by a mission briefing PowerPoint set after the ship has reached its destination, and –bang- we’re into the action.  We in the audience are left thinking, “Really?  These people are just now meeting each other for the first time?  Did they not chat while they were loading their stuff aboard back on Earth?  Oh, and how is it possible that any scientist would sign up for a long, potentially career-derailing, mission without knowing what’s involved?”  So we’re left with thumbnail sketches:  there are Redshirt One, Redshirt Two, Redshirt Three, and Redshirt Four, plus the actors whom we recognize.  Once they’re on Planet Danger, they begin acting in ways that violate even what little we do know about them: the biologist who signed up for a space journey freaks out at the prospect of alien life, then actually tries to pet a scary space-snake.  The geologist runs away from someplace he finds terrifying, only to seek refuge in the exact same place for no real reason.  These examples come right off the top of my head, and the more I think the more I recall.  How can I believe in the plight of these people if I don’t believe they’re people?   (Note: Michael Fassbender’s android character is the most consistent and fully realized of the bunch.  It’s possible that the film’s saying the android is more human than the humans, but that’s the kind of thing you think of later.  While you’re watching the film, you’re thinking, “This doesn’t make sense.”  From there, it’s a short step to “I call BS.”)  And then there’s the funky biology: creatures in this universe appear to have the ability to metabolize thin air.  Humans in this universe can undergo massively invasive abdominal surgery, then run, climb, fight, and singlehandedly rappel fifty feet without tearing open the wound and bleeding out.  And the list goes on.

And that’s the thing about Prometheus.  Those big ideas?  They’re really cool.  That art direction?  That set, costume, and creature design?  Really really cool.  The performances?  The world-class cast acts the heck out of the material, and Michael Fassbender continues his steady march toward Can Do No Wrong status.

But the writing isn’t there.  The characters feel like characters, and the revelations provide more WTH moments than “Oh, wow!” moments.  Prometheus excels at all the “elite filmmaking” stuff, but it stumbles on the fundamentals.  This could have been a great, fascinating, entertaining and wonderful classic that melded the best of Alien and Blade Runner into a rousing, challenging, enriching whole.  Instead, it’s a beautiful failure.  I wanted to love Prometheus.  I was ready to love Prometheus.  I couldn’t love Prometheus.

The Girl Who Played with Fire

I’m having trouble with The Girl Who Played with Fire.  I liked the two leads, I enjoyed seeing more of Sweden, a country I’ve only passed through on my way to other places, and I found the villain sufficiently monstrous.  But I’m still not entirely sure what happened.   I don’t understand how the ball got rolling.  I mean, one minute, Noomi Rapace’s character is living in the sun, happy as can be.  The next, she’s back in cold, cold Stockholm.  Why did she return, other than a dramatic imperative that a popular character must return to the site of its home market?  And the villains, how do they know each other, really? 

Either the source material’s weak or this film got butchered for a US release.  Either way, you’re going to have to work through a bit of muddle so you can enjoy the sleuths, who are well drawn, the settings, which are lovely, and the mystery itself.  Perhaps you can explain it to me.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is as fine a mystery as you’re likely to see this year.

A Swedish film, Tattoo follows a rather ragged investigative journalist as he seeks to unravel the mysterious disappearance of a wealthy and beautiful young woman from an isolated island some 40 years before. The girl with the dragon tattoo is a cyber investigator with in interest in the reporter. She finds herself helping him in ways she hadn’t imagined.

That’s about all I want to tell you about the plot. Besides, it’s a mystery – the plot, more or less, takes care of itself. Characters make mysteries interesting, and the characters here, that of the journalist and the girl, are very interesting people.

The journalist has just been convicted of libel, and he faces a healthy jail term in the very near future. The girl is a tightly wound, exceptionally private genius who can do things with computers that only people who don’t know anything about computers think people can do. Neither of them look like movie stars; they don’t even look like people who’d get along with one another. Nevertheless, they make a great team: unafraid of hard work and research, they spend more time detecting than getting in fistfights, which is a nice change of pace from many American mystery films.

I found that I cared about these people. I felt for them in their moments of danger, I cheered for them in their moments of triumph, and I respected them while they were about the hard, tedious work of unraveling a dark and twisted mystery.

This is a well made film, with an unerring sense of pace and place, that wrapped me up and held me in its spell from beginning to end. I loved The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.