2 out of 5

Director: Guy Ritchie

The first entry in the Holmes ‘reboots’ was by no means a masterpiece, but it was surprisingly intelligent and offered a lot of depth for our principles’ precarious relationship with fairly few words or plotty indulgences.  It also made main baddy Mark Strong into a believably frightful adversary.  I was expected ‘Shadows’ to be a little sequel-y, but whether it was down to the change in scriptwriters or not, Holmes 2 strips the flick of all the shine the first one offered, glamming it up and wasting Holmes’ main adversary, Moriarty – and actor Jared Harris’ excellent abilities to balance his stalwart upright gentleman act with shadiness – as a predictable “I’ve planned everything out ahead of time D’OH EXCEPT FOR THIS OH NOOOO” villain.  Basically we’re treading over similar territory plotwise as film one, which is fine – that someone is putting pieces into place to take over a corner of the world and its up to Holmes to stop him in time – but instead of injecting at least the appearance of mystery, we start the movie, essentially, with a fight scene, and the rest of it follows suit.  London wasn’t particularly grimy the first time around, but this time it sparkles, and the cluttered mind and home of Holmes gets a pretty-boy haircut and cleaned up, Watson brusque exterior a little more gel in his hair and panache.  Ritchie showed incredible growth and restraint in Holmes 1, purposefully applying his slapdash editing style only when it made sense, but it’s like he took what he learned, read a book on big-budget direction, then hooked himself up to a machine to suck out all personality from his style and just delivered it by the books.  ‘Shadows’ is not horrible by any means.  It is fun.  It’s just obvious, and does the Die Hard 2 bit of winking HARD at the audience with too many references to film one.  Which is a sequel problem, as is bigger and better.  But it would’ve been nice to maintain some core elements of what I think surprised viewers like me the first time around.  Oh well.