Spoilers ahead
I quite enjoyed it. It was strangely both much more silly and much more serious than the first. Despite the 2 1/2 hour length I never felt bored or drowsy. The reviews were not very kind but the things they found flawed seemed to me grossly exaggerated. I was very entertained.
I had fun. It was a gobble the popcorn movie. But it will not make any list of best films. A lot of talent went into making two and a half hours of fun.
Fun in the moment but in many ways pretty awful.
The fight gimmick of explaining what will happen before hand and then showing it was overused, but I did like the run through the woods to the train.
Also, Holmes is moved way too far from supremely deductive to simply omniscient.
[spoiler]
“I’ve deduced that while torturing me you will tell a story of a fisherman and a fish so I will, days in advance, draw an amusing animation in my copy of your little notebook that responds to that story…”
“I’ve deduced that I will be captured, and then taken to a specific room in a massive factory that I’ve never been to before where I’ll be tortured. Meanwhile you will engage with a sniper in a suspiciously tall guard tower and eventually realize there is a howitzer nearby and you’ll shoot it at that tower, hitting it in just such a way that it collapses onto the room in which I’m being tortured, leaving me free to escape but Moriarty incapacitated and momentarily harmless.”
Etc.[/spoiler]
I find omniscient bad guys boring in movies. Turns out I find omniscient good guys boring as well.
We saw this last night and had a great time.
We like it enough to feel it wasn’t a waste of money, but can’t say I recommend anyone else doing so. If you are in no hurry, wait for DVD.
My problem is this time around, they really ramped up the action and lost the fun of deduction. There were no truly great “Sherlock” moments that you, as the audience, learned the who, the why and the how based solely on the clues. Yes, there were a few throw-away lines that tried to pretend it was Sherlock solving things, but there was no coherent mystery to solve.
Think of Hercule Poirot suddenly being able to fight off ninja warriors while leaping from balconies, and instead of gathering the suspects in the drawing room for the conclusion, he texts whodunnit to suspects.
Yes, I know that in the real Sherlock books, he was indeed more athletic than in the older versions of these films. However, the BBC version of the young Sherlock is FAR superior in this, while still keeping with the charm of actually using his great deductive mind. This film was mindless in every respect.
I guess the big disappointment was the under use of Stephen Fry as Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s smarter brother. He didn’t get to do or say anything interesting. The Jeremy Brett series occasionally featured Mycroft directly from one of the stories running his brain in circles around everyone, including Sherlock.
obfusciatrist, I disagree with your criticism about Holmes being omniscent. On the contrary, what I liked about this movie was that Holmes was frequently outsmarted by Moriarty - including in one of the bits you included in your spoiler box:
[spoiler] I don’t think Holmes planned for the sniper or the howitzer. I think his plan involved Watson being up in the tower for some reason. The sniper was an example of Moriarty thinking one step ahead of Holmes, just as he had when he misdirected him to the opera instead of the hotel.
The flip book cartoon might be a mistake. The whole “fish” metaphor sprang from Moriarty admiring a piece by Schubert called “The Trout.” I think that was mentioned early enough in the film that Holmes could have faked up a duplicate book and planted it on Moriarty, but I could be wrong. I remember him specifically mentioning it during the torture scene, but I don’t remember for sure if it came up later.
I liked the fight gimmick from the first film quite a bit, and I thought they did a good job of keeping it fresh for this film by changing it up: the fight at the beginning, when he trailing Adler, plays it straight, but the only other two times he does it, it doesn’t turn out how he expected: his fight strategy is interrupted by the gypsy girl throwing knives at the Cossack, which was a pretty good gag. And then, of course, when he uses it against Moriarty, it’s a neat example of how Moriarty is just a brilliant as he is, if not more so. And, of course, it leads him to the conclusion that he can’t possibly win the fight.[/spoiler]
Anyway, I quite liked it. Possibly more than the first - I found the villain’s plot to be much more plausible than in the first one, if vastly more far-reaching.
Also, it had Robert Downey, Jr, half naked, pinned to the floor by Jude Law. That as some first rate ho-yay.
I both enjoyed it, yet felt bored at the same time.
At a few points I found myself wishing there was enough light so I could see the time on my watch, but then there were others where I was glued to the action.
I caught it on Friday. I enjoyed it, but I felt that they had done away with to much of the “mystery” aspect of it, and played up the action.
I also commented to my mother after the fact that it seems they kind of start the film in the middle of the story, with no real effort to explain the beginnings of how they ended up where they started. Granted, that can happen with sequals, but I thought it was a bit jarring. My mother states that several of the Holmes books kind of have that effect. True?
The second movie was pretty much a continuation of the first so there wasnt much need to build the story from the begining. The last story had Moriarty floating in the background and using Holmes lady friend as a messenger. My favorite lines involved Holmes hatred of horses which I share.
“Slow and Steady wins the race!”
I enjoyed it. I do agree that I would have liked more deduction, but it nevertheless kept my interest. It was only 2 hours 9 minutes when I saw it, not 2 1/2. I wonder what accounts for the difference in run times?
I don’t know if anyone else caught it, but when Holmes is on the donkey, the nun’s theme from the Clint Eastwood classic, “Two Mules for Sister Sarah,” is the music that is playing…
I enjoyed it a lot too, although the second act did feel a little bogged down by exposition - maybe it was just me, but almost everything in France seemed to drag. It did have a fantastic ending, though, and that more than makes up for the slow parts.
About the ending: I know that Holmes and Moriarty falling over the edge of the waterfall was straight from the books, but did either the movie or the books state how long Holmes was missing? IIRC, he was gone for years in the books, but it seems like only months in the film.
I too don’t think that Holmes was Omniscient. hefigured out where the surgery room was based on the drawings that Rene had sent to his sister - so he gave that drawing to Watson hoping Watson would come and find him - it gave Watson a point of view of the smokestack/guard tower that he could use to navigate and find Holmes. The only omniscient part of it was figuring out that was where Moriarty would have him taken.
In The Adventure of the Empty House it is said that Holmes traveled for several years after the incident at the falls. However, in the books, he didn’t actually go over the falls, whereas in the film he clearly did. I liked that the movie did not leave the end in suspense, but actually revealed that he was still alive, and in a very humorous way.
I really liked it. REALLY liked it. For some reason it all come together for me and worked well. When it finished, I turned to my wife and said I wanted to see it again, right then. I haven’t said that about a movie in a long time.
I didn’t think Holmes was omniscient, either. He just came through in the end.
I was disappointed that the preview had lines that were cut as it tied to the first movie and showed Watson’s humor and wit as well as their friendship.
We haven’t been buying DVDs and have been going digital, either amazon or Netflix. I haven’t bought any of the summer blockbusters as I usually do but can see buying this not only for the movie but hopefully deleted scenes and outtakes.
I saw it a couple days ago and I liked it very much. The bullet time was a bit overdone, but otherwise, I found it very engaging, witty and very, very well acted by Jude Law and Downey.
I liked it a lot. I am amazed people came away from the movie feeling that Holmes was omniscient. He was outsmarted by Moriarty over and over and even at the end it was rather a Pyhrric victory. I thought it was fun.
I loved it, even more than the first one. I think Downey makes a first-rate Holmes, and it was nice to see him sparring with a worth adversary. I’ve always been a fan of the more physical Holmes, and Downey plays him so smart that he can get away with being an excellent fighter to go with it.
I didn’t like the naked Mycroft, though. To someone who’s read all the Holmes stories, it didn’t make any sense at all. Mycroft is not a humorous figure, and he observes propriety even more than Holmes does. Why on earth would he parade around naked in front of a lady? It was just jarring, and not at all funny. It was nice to see Stephen Fry, though.