The good news: this movie is exactly what you think it would be…that’s also the bad news.
What Works: This is clearly a sequel that wants to leave the first one’s audience happy so once again Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law are back as the ambiguously gay duo, Holmes doesn’t want Watson to get married and tries to keep him from his wife, there’s a maniacal villain on the loose who’s just one step ahead of Holmes, etc. For me, all of the repetition felt a little stale but I savored some of the only new aspects: Naomi Rapace added as the “new girl,” and an excellent slow motion chase/shootout through a forest that looks like an oil painting come to life. Plus, you really can’t dismiss the production design’s effort in recreating old Paris. It’s one of the only things about the movie that doesn’t feel disposable or haphazard.
What Doesn’t Work: The one significant change from the first movie is that this one has slightly more action and significantly less scenes of Holmes figuring out a mystery, which I think makes it less interesting. The new villain (played by the usually very good Jared Harris) is Professor Moriarty, Holmes’s arch nemesis, but there’s something completely uninteresting about him. I can’t tell if it’s the character or the actor, but something whole-sale generic comes off about the professor. Of course, Mark Strong’s villain in the first movie wasn’t very memorable either, and so in a way they’re sticking with the first movie…again. Except for a surprise death fairly early on, there is nothing about this movie that isn’t exactly what you’d expect from the first one, and that slavish devotion to a formula always costs you points in my book.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Some of the homoerotic subtext between Watson and Holmes is so strong (when Sherlock “passionately” kisses a woman in this movie, it looks like he’s physically in pain…at another point he’s dressed up as a woman and asks Watson to lie down with him) it can’t help but make you think there’s a much more unique movie lying right underneath the surface of this one. Maybe the third one in the series will finally let it loose and we’ll have “Sherlock Holmes and the Curious Case of the Empty Metaphorical Closet.”