Get a clue!

Robert Downey Jr. is surely not what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had in mind when he created his fictional Baker Street detective. But in the just-released Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Downey comes one step closer to claiming the character as his own.

Throw out all those fond depictions of Holmes from the past — your Basil Rathbones and your Christopher Lees (after all, Holmes has been portrayed onscreen by at least 75 different actors, a Guinness Book world record) — and Downey, alongside begrudging though faithful Dr. Watson (Jude Law), starts to make sense.

This was not the case with the first Guy Ritchie-directed Sherlock Holmes (2009). I really hated that one: it was an exploding mess, almost like someone trying to tell a story in a live munitions factory. Noisy, and addicted to clever slow-motion shots and quick cuts, it seemed like Ritchie had become the first fully-functional ADHD (as opposed to HD) director.

A Game of Shadows slows down the storytelling a bit, focusing on character and dialogue. But though Ritchie’s 1890s London and Paris is faithfully rendered (thanks to CGI) and loaded with gritty details, the script (by Michele and Kieran Mulroney) is as tongue-in-cheek and postmodern as any comic book revamp could be.

A bit of bromance?: Watson (Jude Law) and Holmes confer on a clue.

And there’s still plenty of action, including lots of things blowing up. That’s elementary, my dear Watson.

Holmes is bunkered down in his Baker Street rooms when Watson arrives at the movie’s opening. The doctor plays hide and seek, and is presently tagged by a couple blow darts, courtesy of a hidden Holmes, disguised as a bookcase and curtain. “Urban camouflage,” he calls it. Downey, who looks like he was dipped in a vat of grime to play Holmes, leads Watson to a chart of recent news clippings: anarchists are planting bombs throughout Paris and Germany, creating tensions that will eventually lead to World War I. He’s also taken to chewing coca leaves, and in the opening sequence he’s seen disguised as a Chinese coolie puffing away on an opium pipe — curious in-jokes for an actor notorious for his rehab visits. (In fact, much of Downey’s performance is a case of prestidigitation: now you see it, now you don’t. My wife describes Downey’s career as a mystery, like he’s trying to con the audience into accepting that he’s acting. I find his acting oddly one-note, because you can never really forget that he’s Robert Downey Jr. But the one note is pretty convincing.)

We learn that Watson is about to be wed, and Holmes is supposed to be the best man. This leads to a botched stag party in a private men’s club, where we meet Holmes’s smarter brother, Mycroft (Stephen Fry), and an anxious gypsy fortuneteller, Simza (Noomi Rapace, from the Swedish The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), whose brother has been recruited by a shady boss to plant bombs.

This shady boss turns out to be Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris, seen in Perfume, Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Mad Men), a respected mathematics scholar who is secretly planning to corner all the weapons-manufacturing profit when all hell breaks loose and the world decides to go to war. So he’s kind of like Dick Cheney in that regard.

Watson and new wife Mary (Kelly Reilly) take a train to Brighton for their honeymoon, but Moriarty has sent assassins onboard to take them out; fortunately Holmes, badly disguised as a woman, is also onboard and manages to defuse the situation — that is, by making sure most of the train gets blown up.

Another one of Downey’s “now you see it” tendencies: gaying up Holmes to a point far beyond Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s deepest subconscious intentions. Looking like Heath Ledger’s Joker, with red lipstick smeared across his mouth and garish blue guyliner, he insists that Watson “lie down on the ground next to me” as assassin sharpshooters take aim on their coach car. Of course, Downey himself has often danced around sexual identity issues, and the whole Holmes-Watson thing is played for repressed homoerotic laughs, far more than Butch and Sundance, or even Batman and Robin for that matter. It leads to amusing situations, though of course the long-suffering Mary is pretty much left out of the equation (she has an amusing bit where she’s being “protected” in the mansion of Mycroft, who insists on wandering around stark naked. Shades of Seinfeld’s “bad naked.”)

What makes A Game of Shadows better than the first Holmes is the focus on character development. Here, it’s the bromance between Holmes and Watson, and a worthy adversary in Moriarty (the script is roughly based on a Doyle story called “The Final Problem”). In fact, the best scenes are cat-and-mouse exchanges between the professor and the great detective, and you start to realize that this is what really makes Sherlock Holmes such a compelling character: he’s the smartest guy in the room, the one who can pick out 50 details where most see only one or two; yet in Moriarty, he is evenly matched, and that makes for a good second half to A Game of Shadows.

Dragon lady: Noomi Rapace plays gypsy Simza.

Yet Ritchie (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, Rocknrolla) is a director more inclined to macho filmmaking, however homoerotic the undertones: man-on-man combat in super slow motion, the grating audio mixes, the large bursting fireballs. Like Terry Gilliam, a bloated ego in love with his bloated sets, Ritchie also has a tendency to derail his own story by focusing on the cleverness of his setups and designs. There are direct homages to Pulp Fiction and even Saving Private Ryan, but all of this testosterone seems a little beside the point from the violin-playing, pipe-smoking Holmes of Doyle’s creation, who was more likely to put together all the puzzle pieces in a fireplace-warmed sitting room rather in a dark alleyway, calculating whose bones will break first.

Oddly, there’s another Holmes revamp currently on the small screen, a BBC One series called Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch as the detective and Martin Freeman as his reluctant Watson. This one has many of the same postmodern touches — Holmes is recast in modern-day London, with Mycroft helping out at MI5 and Moriarty lurking in the shadows, plotting world domination. The show is intelligent and stylish without resorting to any Hollywood bombast. Yet Cumberbatch is an oddly detached Holmes, a man with a personality defect, much as our favorite comic superheroes are now routinely depicted as social misfits. In Downey’s case, Holmes is never afflicted with social introversion or misanthropy; rather he simply suffers from acute Downey’s syndrome.