Okay, to start things off, I am a confessed fan of the following: Robert Downey, Jr., Guy Ritchie, and Sherlock Holmes. The stories of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson started with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet in 1886 and hasn't stopped since. It's been told and re-told in every which way, and I've got to say that this incarnation has been one of my favorites. Ritchie and Downey stylize Holmes as a character that is simultaneously real and over-the-top, and I love that because it makes the character totally unbelievable, but at the same time you want him to be real so very badly. Their version brings out both the good and the bad in Holmes: his uncanny skills at forensics, deduction, combat blah blah blah we know all of this, but it also shows the flaws that have been there since the original stories but have been largely overlooked in the past: a complete and utter lack of care for his own health, his social ineptitude, and even allusions to his self-destructive drug habit. More importantly than depicting Holmes as the flawed character as he is, Guy Ritchie has made Sherlock Holmes relevant in the 21st century, and that's kind of a hard thing to do.
The acting was great. Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law have their buddy-dynamic down to a science. Rachel McAdams and Karen Reilly,both back from the first movie as Irene Adler and Mary Watson (formerly Mary Morstan) got to show more range with their characters, and in my opinion did very well. We finally got to see how Irene Adler acts when she's confronted by the one man who really scares her, and the new Mrs. Watson goes from playing victim to Holmes' schemes to actively participating in them. Series newcomers Noomi Rapace, Stephen Fry, Jared Harris, and Paul Anderson round out the main cast of the movie, and man, do they all do great. Stephen Fry never fails to be funny, and he brings his A-game while playing Sherlock's older, more eccentric brother, Mycroft. Noomi Rapace plays Madam Simza Heron, a gypsy fortune-teller from France whose brother is involved in Professor Moriarty's nefarious plot to cause a world war. And speaking of Moriarty, Jared Harris does an AWESOME job playing the Napoleon of Crime. The interactions between Holmes and Moriarty are so dripping with venom that you squirm in your seat as the two try to outhink the other.
As far as the technical aspects of the movie are concerned, it's SOOO Guy Ritchie. Much more so than the first movie. It has more of the quick, choppy asides that are more characteristic of his earlier films, and the seemingly inconsequential actions from earlier in the film are of the utmost importance in the final act. But my complaints aren't with the acting or the directing. It's mainly with the story. There's one main instance in the story that illustrates what my problem is: Moriarty's men are on a train trying to assassinate Dr. Watson and Mary on their honeymoon, and fortunately Holmes has boarded the train as well to assist in their escape. At one point, Holmes, disguised in drag, has planted a lipstick tube filled with phosphorous in one of the bandoliers of one of the assassins. When the assassins have finally cornered Holmes and Watson, the assassin had just so happened to have placed the lipstick tube in his rifle, causing it to backfire on him and allowing the two to escape. My problem with this is that Holmes takes credit for that being part of his grand design, but there was no way for him to know that his contraption would be used at that particular moment, especially since this is after several shootouts. The placement of the lipstick tube at that moment was sheer luck, but both the character and the movie chalk it up to Holmes' brilliance. I know it seems kind of nitpicky, but the movie is kind of full of this, so I'm really not being hypercritical of a particular point.
All in all, though, any fan of the first movie should go see this. It's a little more scattered, as it has to keep up with more characters at once, but it's all worth it to watch the exchanges between Holmes and Moriarty.
I give it 8 out of 10 slow-motion fight scenes.
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