Game on: Guy Ritchie turns up the heat in the new Sherlock Holmes flick

Prior to stumbling upon the Sherlock Holmes franchise in 2009, Brit writer-director Guy Ritchie was best known for a series of cult classics that paired rapid-fire sarcastic dialogue with a distinctive visual style characterized by jump cuts and slow motion shots. If his previous efforts were a little offbeat (and British), then he’s found a perfect match with Arthur Conan Doyle’s character. Sure, he’s distorted the great detective story to the point that Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) is essentially an action hero (and a pretty buff one at that), but that’s also enabled his art house sensibilities to make their way into the multiplex and ring up some serious box office bank as a result.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, the sequel to the 2009 hit, literally begins with a bang as an explosion rips through a busy public building and newspaper headlines suggest tension between Germany and France is at the heart of the bombing. Sherlock is quickly on the case, intercepting a letter that Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) is to pass on to Professor Moriarity (Jared Harris). The letter leads Sherlock to an underground club and then to a gypsy camp (almost as colorful as those in Ritchie’s 2000 film, Snatch) which in turn enables him to uncover Moriarty’s master plan to stock up on ammunition and weapons and then start a world war and cash in.

There are probably a few too many subplots here. Loyal sidekick Watson (Jude Law) is the middle of his honeymoon when Holmes whisks him away to attend to the more urgent matter of world peace, and Holmes’ brother Mycroft (Stephen Fry) has an ancillary role that doesn’t amount to much. A gypsy fortune-teller Sim (Noomi Rapace) in search of her anarchist brother never emerges into a fully developed character and certainly doesn’t provide the kind of romantic connection to Holmes that we saw between Holmes and Irene in Sherlock Holmes.

But the good stuff outweighs the bad here. Some of the action scenes are brilliantly executed – in particular, a night at the opera that turns into a massacre. Throughout the film, Holmes resorts to a number of creative tricks and ruses (dressing up in drag, faking his death) in order to weasel his way out of jams, often tricking Watson (Jude Law) along the way (Holmes’ stunt in the film’s final scene is truly inspired and should elicit a good laugh). While the storyline drags a bit mid-stream, Ritchie packs enough action into the film to keep the film moving for its 128-minute running time and Downey Jr. and Law have such great chemistry as detective and sidekick, that you could find yourself anticipating the next sequel.