Film Review: Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows

Certificate: 12A (intense sequences of violence and action, some drug material)
Directed By: Guy Ritchie
Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Jared Harris, Noomi Rapace, Rachel McAdams, Kelly Reilly, Stephen Fry
Budget: $125 million
Runtime: 129 minutes
Trailer: Watch

After the mega success of 2009's Sherlock Holmes it is hardly surprising that Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law should reprise their roles and rekindle their latent bromance. This time round Holmes (Downey Jr) must connect a spate of terrorist attacks which threaten to plunge Europe into war with the well respected Professor Moriarty (Harris) suspected of being behind it all.

The immediate distinction of A Game Of Shadows from the first film is its scope. It is a globe-trotting adventure which takes Holmes from London to Paris to Germany, only to end in Reichenbach Falls - a site familiar to those acquainted with Arthur Conan Doyle's novels. The problem with this however is that its grand ambition causes the plot to lose sight of itself in a way which sacrifices the deductive reasoning for which Holmes is famed. Where the first film was at least coherently intricate enough, here the pieces of the puzzle are clunkily positioned for Holmes to assemble. For all intents and purposes the first film was in many ways 'cleverer' where here everything feels strangely disjointed, which is a little disappointing given the precedence. Likewise the puzzle itself hardly seems befitting of the supreme intellect that Moriarty, "the Napoleon of crime", is said to command in Doyle's novels. Where the original Sherlock Holmes enjoyed playing intellectual tricks on its audience, this is an altogether more straightforward affair.

What director Guy Ritchie has done is try to bring James Bond into nineteenth-century Victorian Britain as action takes priority. A Game Of Shadows features more brawls with assassins and slow-motion action sequences which, while still looking cool, serve to dilute their purpose. Indeed, slow-motion is ostensibly used to illustrate Holmes' powers of perception which was used to great effect in the first outing, but here it is used too unsparingly to the point where it loses meaning. It is literally more, much more, of the same which manifests in a general feeling of lacklustre. The mechanics of sprightly spontaneity which made the original such a success are no longer fresh which consequently casts a shroud of inevitability over events. Indeed, one won't be nearly as enjoyably surprised as before.

A Game Of Shadows is a prime example of overemphasis on style which causes the plot to suffer and undermine the actors' sinew. Noomi Rapace for example is criminally underdeveloped, merely hanging around without adding anything to proceedings. Likewise, there is a tangible sense that Holmes and Watson (Law) are just itching to release their unbridled intellects but are just cut short by another relentless action sequence. While admittedly the first film was also foremost an action film, at least it left room for intellectual pondering. Here Ritchie has sought to blunt that notion which is disappointing ultimately because it is Holmes' cerebral abilities which we celebrate, not his brawn.

This might seem a little harsh on A Game Of Shadows as despite all of this it is still undeniably good fun. This is primarily down to two outstanding performances. Of course, Downey Jr's portrayal of Holmes is once again enjoyable in a manner similar to that of Depp's Jack Sparrow. Eccentric and flamboyant as always, he bears uncanny resemblance to his other anchor role of Tony Stark in Iron Man. However, it would be fair to say that Holmes is ultimately the more toothsome of the two to watch. While both are unmatched geniuses with unrestrained egos, Holmes displays more humanity than Stark which makes him easier to relate to. For all Holmes' brilliance, he is also a much more vividly damaged human being like the rest of us. It is also worth noting Stephen Fry's enjoyable little cameo as Holmes' brother, a high-up official in the British Foreign Office who is unusually nihilistic for one involved in the formalities of diplomacy and high-politics.

Perhaps more deserving of credit however is one Jared Harris who is outstanding in his portrayal of arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty. Harris is no stranger to the role of nutty professor, also having been delectable as evil genius David Robert Jones in TV series Fringe. The best bits of A Game Of Shadows inevitably occur when the two behemoth intellects of Holmes and Moriarty clash, but unfortunately this is not something which happens often enough. If anything Harris, probably the best thing about the film, suffers like many characters here and is disappointingly underused.

Still, despite the flaws this isn't wholly disappointing. It is confident and amusing and this serves well to mask many of its problems. The main problem with A Game Of Shadows though is that it tries to be both beauty and brains. It's incessant insistance on luxuriously choreographed action sequences form tears in the fabric of what Holmes is supposed to be about; his smarts. And as one might deduce, God doesn't give with both hands.

Film Review: Hugo

Set in 1930s Paris, orphan Hugo Cabret (Butterfield) is left to maintain the clocks in a Parisian railway station after his drunken uncle disappears. Aided by a precocious young girl named Isabelle (Moretz), Hugo manages to fix an automaton inherited from his father (Law) which draws a picture that instigates a mystery involving a disconsolate old shopkeeper (Kingsley) at the station.

Like The Artist, Hugo is a display of passion for cinema. Indeed, there are some uncanny familiarities here as this French-accented film also screams from the roof tops its adoration for the movies. Where they differ however is that while The Artist was a love story for the golden age of cinema in general, Hugo is a much more personal tale about film pioneer Georges Méliès, who saw movies not just as a gimmick but something literally quite magical. In many ways Hugo is also a much more tender, personal effort from Martin Scorsese.

To say Hugo is striking would be an understatement. Scorsese has created a stunningly well realised world where the majority of the action takes place in the railway station Gare Montpanasse, which unfortunately has since been torn down and was completely rebuilt in 1969. It is a setting which harks to the days of La Belle Époque and, while patently real, also seems very fantastical and dreamlike at the same time. More than anything you will fall in love with Hugo's exuberant setting, but this still remains very much alive, rich as much in character as it is colour and setting.

Hugo and Isabelle's inchoate romance sparkles while Ben Kingsley is superb as a wistful Papa Georges. Moreover however it is perhaps the supporting cast who add an exquisit finesse to proceedings. Hugo enjoyably treats us to little glimpses of the station regulars' lives, none of these more entertaining than Sacha Baron Cohen's crippled orphan-hunting station inspector. Sporting a ridiculous accent reminiscent of Arthur Bostrom's Officer Crabtree in 'Allo 'Allo, we are also invited to sympathise with this man when he reveals the reason for his disability. Likewise, a propitious Christopher Lee plays a bookseller who fondly dispenses novels with added gusto. There is a very real feeling to Hugo's characters, who are very much human in their complexities. And enjoyably so.

In many ways though, Hugo is only a perfunctory children's story. Scorsese makes no secret of the point he's trying to make here - that of the artistic consequences of Hollywood's cynical pursuit of profits. Like Méliès' films which were mostly lost when the French army melted them down to retrieve chemicals for the war effort, Hugo serves as a warning that the art of filmmaking may just as easily disappear once again in Hollywood's greed. But then we also have to consider that Hugo is in 3D, a money making scam if ever there was one. While Scorsese's choice to film in this medium may on the one hand raise accusations of profitting from the same gimmicks Hollywood espouses, one could equally draw parallels with Méliès own embrace of new film techniques. However it is the intent behind Hugo which should clarify which position it is. Admittedly Scorsese has rather interestingly made use of Hollywood's latest fad to remind us all of what great films are really about, and given the remarkable world created here you could indeed make the case that this kind of movie magic is what 3D is meant for.

Hugo is a lovingly detailed world full of wonderment and allure which will bring a fond tear to any cinephile's eye. Admittedly it can be a bit maudlin, but this is nonetheless enchanting to say the least. Hugo is as much a tale for all as it is a personal love letter to cinema from one of the greatest film romantics of our time.

Film Review: Contagion

Hollywood has been through just about every permeation of potential causes for man's demise. From asteroids to nuclear war, killer bees to volcanoes, polar shifts to alien invasions, now it would seem that viruses are flavour of the week. Even the current pop-culture fascination with zombies invariably begins with some nasty little germ mutation. And what with recent scares over H1N1, bird flu and SARS serving to whip up a panicked frenzy, it seems fitting then that a film posit 'what if the wrong pig met up with the wrong bat?'. What if the result was some sort of pig-bat virus, transmitted through touch and able to claim your life in a matter of days? Contagion attempts to provide the answer.

When an unknown deadly virus begins knocking off seemingly random people around the globe, authorities race against time to track the source of the contagion and find a cure. Meanwhile a man (Damon) must deal with the sudden deaths of his wife (Paltrow) and son-in-law as society breaks down and an internet conspiracy theorist (Law) blogs myths of a cure which only serves to exacerbate the panic.

This is your typical 'what if' scenario similar in vain to 1980s disaster movie The Day After and global warming/cooling/whatever doomsday effort, The Day After Tomorrow. Like those, Contagion's grounding in reality can be a rather frightening prospect. An unseen killer, easily transmitted, accentuated by director Steven Soderbergh's lingering shots of touched doorknobs and surfaces for a few seconds longer than necessary. We are introduced to cities with their population totals flashed at the bottom of our screen while bodies are piled into massgraves and the death toll rises. And yet, Contagion never gives the impression that this disease is all that deadly. While the film's globe-trotting exploits are supposed to give you a sense of scale and magnitude, we aren't really given any stats as to how many people the virus has claimed. There is a snippet which mentions that, after a year, 2.5million have died in the US, but this represents only 1% of the US population. If we were to scale this out and assume that figures were similar in the rest of the world then it doesn't seem as unbearable as the film suggests. That may sound callous but if you take one of the most deadly natural disasters in human history, the Spanish flu which killed some 10% of the world's population back in 1918, this virus seems relatively small fish in comparison.

Indeed, fears can be further allayed when I read that the virus in Contagion isn't exactly scientifically accurate either. While the disease in the film is highly lethal, infects large amounts of people and has a very short incubation period, the reality is somewhat further removed from such a scenario. In reality an infectious disease must have a relatively long incubation period and less lethality than the film propositions in order for the virus to continue to spread. Consequently tracking the disease, which is a central plot point in Contagion, is much more difficult than the film suggests. As such many facts had to be bent in order for the story to work, and so Contagion's premise perhaps not as frightening as it first suggests.

More frightening though is the societal effects of the virus. As authorities fail to contain the outbreak and food riots ensue, people begin looking to alternative sources for guidance. Cue Jude Law's Alan Krumwiede, a conspiracist blogger claiming the government are in on it all and that the only cure is a homeopathic medicine called 'Forsythia'. Inevitably panic spreads in a fashion which seems more contagious than the virus itself as people loot pharmacies in search of this miraculous placebo. As many of us get our information from the internet these days we often forget that not all of it is vetted and corroborated. The internet is essentially a double-edged sword, both doing wonders for the proliferation of information yet burdened with an equal capacity to transmit dangerous myths and rumour. With regards to Krumwiede he quite evidently has a screw loose but what's more interesting is how the film paints him as the 'bad guy', embodying everything 'unAmerican' from dodgy accent to bad teeth. And yet Krumwiede raises some interesting points about pharmaceutical companies creating crises in order to profit as well as the unforeseen consequences of vaccines such as autism or the swine flu shot which actually killed people back in 1976. Yes he misleads people and hypocritically uses the situation to his advantage in the same vain he accuses big pharma of by becoming a modern day snake-oil salesman, but the ad-hominem portrayal of a paranoid, anorak-wearing crack-pot acts to invalidate some perfectly reasonable questions. The fact that he's Australian could also allude to another infamous Aussie whistle-blower that authorities have had a problem with lately, one Julian Assange.

Perhaps Contagion's biggest problem however is that its all star cast and jumping all over the world doesn't leave much room for showcasing their talent. Nor do you really get the time to build an empathetic relationship with their characters where you probably won't really care which Hollywood superstar snuffs it next. Damon's everyman isn't really afforded the opportunity to capture grief very well as he quarantines himself and his daughter inside their house for the majority of the film while Winslet promises spunk but is sold short just as soon as she sparks interest. Cottilard's WHO (World Health Organisation) epidemiologist meanwhile is given perhaps the most dramatic story arc yet it is one the film shafts right until the end. So much so in fact that it needn't have been even incorporated into the script. Only is the CDC (Centre for Disease Control) head-honcho, played by Laurence Fishburne, given any sort of multi-faceted depth, embodying the same human fallacies of self-interest, stupidity and arrogance as the rest of us. Indeed, it is these three facets alluded to throughout the film which are more scary than any killer-virus could be. Moreover though the briskness with which Contagion shoots over everything, while admittedly serving well to create a fluidity of event, also unfortunately sacrifices character development for something which looks much more like a documentary.

But then, this is the nature of the beast where globe-trotting films are invariably driven more by events than characters. And yet, it still feels like a disappointing waste of talent, even a gimmick to pull in audiences. Everything would have worked exactly the same had its characters been played by just about anyone else. Consequently Contagion is a film without sympathy, as clinical as its scientists who scramble in their lab for a cure. Like the humans involved here it's not perfect, but if you're into your apocalyptic scenarios you might want to give this a go. Preferably with a face mask.