Full of action, battles of wit, red herrings, a bit of steam punk, and slightly more than cutting-edge 100-year old science, the second of the new Sherlock Holmes incarnations attempts to dazzle. Again with Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law as the iconic characters of Holmes and Watson, this edition, "Sherlock Holmes: A Games of Shadows," was, for my taste, a bit too self-consciously clever, too much of a show-off. Up against his smartest foe, Professor Moriarty, the games of out-thinking and out-maneuvering depict Holmes as a paragon of prognostication, a gleeful mental and physical combatant that often veers over the line into self-parody. Director Guy Richie employs here a short-hand device, disconcerting at first, that compresses flashbacks into a fast-motion swirl of hidden history that aptly suits his purpose. The movie has style to burn, a beautiful dark gypsy (Noomi Rapace, last seen as Lisbeth in the Swedish version of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"), Holmes' eccentric brother (hysterically underplayed by Stephen Fry), and enough gun fire, both in slow motion and Gatling gun fast, to start a major war (which it foretells). For me, it partook too much of the senselessness of a Michael Bay violence orgy, and its set pieces were well-crafted, operatic duds.
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