Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows Review and Discussion

[Yminale]

^ I'm well aware of that. I was just stating that I believe thanks to McAdam's stellar performance and popularity of her role in the Richie film...has elevated the character's standing in recent years.

I have to disagree. I thought McAdam was one of the weak points of the first Sherlock movie and the fact that they dramatically reduced her role (and possibly killed her) in the second seems to imply that.

Irene Addler has always been a very popular character and McAdam's performance neither added to or taken away from that.

BTW now that you mention it, why is Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes and Moffit/Gratiss Sherlock Holmes so similar. In both, Holmes is a drug addicted sociopath with a serious case of Asperger, Watson seem to be either really angry or really morose, and Addler is a verry bad girl. It seems they are cribbing from the same source and it's definitely not the original stories. At least Moriarty is different.

 

[Admiral_Young]

I actually think Rachel's role in the film was reduced to her shooting schedule for other films she was working on at the time

 

[Yminale]

I actually think Rachel's role in the film was reduced to her shooting schedule for other films she was working on at the time

That's a pity because she at least looked better in the second movie. Whoever did the makeup in the second movie did a better job than in the first.

 

[Trekker4747]

I believe, isn't Holmes a bit more kept with his appearance?

 

[Admiral_Young]

Yep. Lot less dirty too...but Sherlock's appearance is just one more thing that is different that I love about this take on the character.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

Guy Ritchie's movies place more emphasis on Irene Adler than Arthur Conan Doyle did. She's only a minor character in the original ACD canon, having only appeared in 1 story ("A Scandal in Bohemia"). But then, Moriarty is really only a minor character too, having only appeared in 1 story ("The Final Problem") and then getting name dropped in a couple others ("The Empty House" & "The Valley of Fear").

However, Irene Adler has been a greatly elaborated-upon character even before the 2009 movie. I forget the name of the author but someone wrote an entire series of Irene Adler novels, positing her as a female Sherlock Holmes. (Someone also wrote a similar series centered on Mycroft Holmes. And then there was the series about an old, retired Sherlock Holmes training a young female apprentice. I think Laurie King wrote those.)

BTW now that you mention it, why is Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes and Moffit/Gratiss Sherlock Holmes so similar. In both, Holmes is a drug addicted sociopath with a serious case of Asperger, Watson seem to be either really angry or really morose, and Addler is a verry bad girl. It seems they are cribbing from the same source and it's definitely not the original stories.

Actually, I would say that they are cribbing from the original stories. They are exaggerating some of these elements beyond what ACD did but I suspect they're both doing it for the same reason. They're both doing Sherlock Holmes emphasizing all of the intensely misanthropic, quirky qualities that ACD included but were suspiciously absent from most previous movie/TV versions (particularly Basil Rathbone). Prior to Robert Downey Jr. & Benedict Cumberbatch, the only other Sherlock Holmes that came anywhere close to the asshole that ACD originally wrote was Rupert Everett in Sherlock Holmes & the Case of the Silk Stocking. (Well, Matt Frewer was also an asshole, but not in a good way.)

I must admit that it would bug me a bit if Irene somehow ends up being alive.... while I liked her character, having her somehow survive would take something away from Moriarty for me. For a man who was very precise in how he does things (including tying up loose ends), letting someone survive would seem like a major screwup for him. Hell, Irene specifically chose that meeting location because she didn't think that Moriarty would attempt to kill her in a crowded location. I don't think she would really plan far enough ahead to pick the crowded location and then in the event of that failing, having the antidote for the specific poison he would hit her with and then still be able to convincingly fake her own death.

My pet theory is that she seduced Col. Moran into helping her fake her own death so that she could get away from Moriarty. She was never poisoned at all. As for how Moriarty was fooled by the ruse, two words: Dehydrated rhodedendron!

I probably would have preferred a more ambiguous ending except for the fact that I love those camoflage suits! (Although, even with the oxygen tank & his incredible reflexes, it still really strains even the laws of movie physics that he could have survived that fall at all.)

Perhaps he timed it perfectly!

It's not a matter of timing but height. Reichenbach Falls looked way higher than that bridge where Sherlock threw Mary off the train.

 

[Pauln6]

Irene has been elevated partly because modern audiences prefer the presence of a heroine, partly because capable heroines are more common today, and partly because her spiky relationship with Sherlock adds so much comic fodder.

I admit that the updated Milady de Winter looked like a bit of a car crash to me because a twenty-something Lara Croft addict probably wrote the script and misunderstood the concept of an assassin.

I rather liked this verson of Irene, although I was happy to see that she didn't dominate the movie. Like Marion Ravenwood, I think any sequel would be the better if she featured again.

 

[MacLeod]

^ I'm well aware of that. I was just stating that I believe thanks to McAdam's stellar performance and popularity of her role in the Richie film...has elevated the character's standing in recent years.

I have to disagree. I thought McAdam was one of the weak points of the first Sherlock movie and the fact that they dramatically reduced her role (and possibly killed her) in the second seems to imply that.

Irene Addler has always been a very popular character and McAdam's performance neither added to or taken away from that.

BTW now that you mention it, why is Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes and Moffit/Gratiss Sherlock Holmes so similar. In both, Holmes is a drug addicted sociopath with a serious case of Asperger, Watson seem to be either really angry or really morose, and Addler is a verry bad girl. It seems they are cribbing from the same source and it's definitely not the original stories. At least Moriarty is different.

It's been several years since I last read some of the Holmes stories, but from memory he was a drug addict.

 

[Trekker4747]

Yes. Holmes recreationally did cocaine to combat boredom between cases.

 

[Destructor]

I think it's quite likely that Irene is still alive since her death wasn't reported anywhere and they deliberately didn't show us what happened, instead giving a Usual Suspects style retelling that could be entirely manufactured. I did wonder if smelling her handkerchief before tossing it overboard might have more signficance that the assumption that he was smelling her perfume.

Agreed, completely- my theory is that Adler never drunk the tea at all (knowing she was under threat from Moriarty), and held the handkerchief to her face in order to inhale some substance that would simulate death and fool Moriarty. Holmes, smelling the handkerchief, would deduce this.

Am hoping to get some confirmation on this from Ritchie or McAdams, as it was a real annoyance for me the way they casually knocked her off.

 

[Admiral_Young]

We probably won't get any confirmation on this issue for a long while since they hired Pearce and he's probably only started work on the third film. I don't expect any real news on the next one for a while actually. Which is quite different than this one which was fast tracked right away after the HUGE opening Christmas Day box office intake. In fact Richie dropped out of directing "Sgt. Rock" which was going to be his follow up project.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Am I the only person that's just fine with her being dead?

 

[Admiral_Young]

^ Maybe. I think as much as I really like Irene that if she does return it will take something away from the emotional scene between Sherlock and Watson on the ferry. Watson knows his friend is hurting but can't really bring himself to bring it up, and Sherlock likes to bury his feelings. I just really love how that particular scene plays out.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Am I the only person that's just fine with her being dead?

I'm perfectly fine with that; one of the first things we learn about Irene in the Canon is that she is, at the time Watson is writing, dead. The first paragraph of SCAN ends "And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory." (Emphasis mine.)

My take on the Ritchie films -- and it's an idea that's been germinating since Sunday when I saw A Game of Shadows -- is that Watson's stories for The Strand are the fictional accounts of Sherlock Holmes' real adventures, since the film ends with Watson writing FINA. Watson writes throughout the Canon that he's redacted this, renamed that, altered details for clarity or discretions, etc., etc. It's always been a question of just how reliable a narrator Watson is, and Watson is taken by Holmesians to have been fairly accurate. Ritchie and Downey, it seems to me, are taking an entirely different tack with the material -- their read of the Canon is that Watson cleaned up a lot when he wrote down his accounts, which means he's not entirely reliable in his descriptions of certain things. Watson's prose made Holmes more... respectable, shall we say.

My view of this film, then, is that it tells the true story of the Reichenbach experience, and that Watson's published account was a heavily edited, simplified, and streamlined version of the actual events. And thus, when Irene dies, it's because she was dead in the Canon, and Watson was being truthful when he described her as "late."

 

[Eduardo]

My take on the Ritchie films -- and it's an idea that's been germinating since Sunday when I saw A Game of Shadows -- is that Watson's stories for The Strand are the fictional accounts of Sherlock Holmes' real adventures, since the film ends with Watson writing FINA. Watson writes throughout the Canon that he's redacted this, renamed that, altered details for clarity or discretions, etc., etc. It's always been a question of just how reliable a narrator Watson is, and Watson is taken by Holmesians to have been fairly accurate. Ritchie and Downey, it seems to me, are taking an entirely different tack with the material -- their read of the Canon is that Watson cleaned up a lot when he wrote down his accounts, which means he's not entirely reliable in his descriptions of certain things. Watson's prose made Holmes more... respectable, shall we say.

Going by that notion, you have to assume that the entire novel "The Sign of the Four" is a story made up by Watson ?

 

[Allyn Gibson]

My take on the Ritchie films -- and it's an idea that's been germinating since Sunday when I saw A Game of Shadows -- is that Watson's stories for The Strand are the fictional accounts of Sherlock Holmes' real adventures, since the film ends with Watson writing FINA. Watson writes throughout the Canon that he's redacted this, renamed that, altered details for clarity or discretions, etc., etc. It's always been a question of just how reliable a narrator Watson is, and Watson is taken by Holmesians to have been fairly accurate. Ritchie and Downey, it seems to me, are taking an entirely different tack with the material -- their read of the Canon is that Watson cleaned up a lot when he wrote down his accounts, which means he's not entirely reliable in his descriptions of certain things. Watson's prose made Holmes more... respectable, shall we say.

Going by that notion, you have to assume that the entire novel "The Sign of the Four" is a story made up by Watson ?

Not the entire novel. Just its account of how Watson and Holmes met Mary Morstan. There's nothing in the first Holmes movie that absolutely precludes SIGN from occurring.

 

[InklingStar]

Am I the only person that's just fine with her being dead?

I like the character but I would prefer that she died as was shown. Anything less severely cheapens the character of Moriarty. All too often, television and movies build up a villain only to make them continually fail whenever they interact with the hero or other main characters. Having Moriarty defeat Irene right off the bat - the same Irene that danced her way out of dangerous situations in the first movie - shows the audience that he is indeed a dangerous man, and one who takes care of loose ends.

 

[Admiral_Young]

I don't know if it cheapens Moriarty's character if Irene is revealed alive. It just means that he lied to Sherlock in order get the emotional reaction from he was trying to provoke in the first place. Also he didn't "defeat" Irene, she wasn't an enemy of his...remember that she was under his employ for quite awhile. He got rid of her because her feelings for Holmes were becoming a liability to his operations. If anything as I've pointed out before, what it does is cheapen the Ferry scene between Holmes and Watson.

 

[Harvey]

If it was truly her end, I wish they would have made it more definitive. The way she falls off-screen seems like they wanted it to be ambiguous, in case they needed her for a sequel.

 

[Admiral_Young]

Perhaps I should have included a spoiler warning in the thread title....we've been outright discussing significant plot points. Ah well.