DVD Blu-Ray: Sherlock Holmes – A Game of Shadows

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Well, this one will be going straight onto that small pile I own, categorised as: “crap”!

If you like your films loud and brash – this one is for you. Explosions, hand-to-hand combat, fancy fight moves, guns, violence and chase scenes were all in evidence – a sort of ‘Die Hard with a Deer-Stalker’ (OK, there was no deer-stalker in the film).

Maybe I’m spoiled, having rediscovered the Sherlock character through the excellent writing skills of Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss for the BBC series Sherlock – but this DVD was just WRONG in every possible way.

Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law are both credible actors, but they did nothing for me. The only way I got through it was to pretend it was just a film about a couple of guys in old-ee London-ee town-ee playing detectives.

The ‘London’ created in the film seemed to be a place filled visually and aurally with actors from the ‘Dick-Van-Dyke-School-of-Cockneys’ on their way from the auditions for Mary Poppins. What is it with our film-casting friends the other side of the pond who find it mandatory to have Americans ‘do’ English accents? Meryl Streep – YES… these guys – NOOOOOOO! Let’s be clear, English actors can do American accents (Damian Lewis and Jeremy Isaacs to offer two recent TV examples) – it doesn’t work the other way around, so please stop trying – it hurts our ears.

Continuing in ‘Meldrew-mode: The story structure was all over the place. The first 40 minutes was so mind-numbingly boring I felt sure it MUST be leading to something  really big. No, unfortunately, it wasn’t. I’m no script-writer, but isn’t that where you are supposed to establish the film’s framework?

OK, on a couple of positive notes, (that’s your lot!) they did manage to squeeze in many of the characters we already know, and Sherlock did do a little deducing (I use the term lightly) – but only for about 60 seconds across the WHOLE film.

They say that sequels have to work harder than the film that spawned them – for me, it looked as if they hadn’t tried at all. The worst film of the year so far – Yuk!