SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS: Dangerous at Both Ends and Crafty in the Middle

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) – Directed by Guy Ritchie – Starring Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Jared Harris, Noomi Rapace, Rachel McAdams, Kelly Reilly, Eddie Marsan, Paul Anderson, and Stephen Fry.

It was fun.

Next!

Sometimes I watch a movie and there’s just not a lot I want to say about it. Such is the case of SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS. It’s a thoroughly entertaining film with more of Robert Downey Jr. being roguishly, charmingly impossible, with Jude Law being reluctantly happy to be along for the ride. There’s plenty of slo-mo action scenes (which Guy Ritchie has to include or the world will end), plenty of playful nods to Holmes and Watson’s homoeroticism, plenty of things blowing up, and plenty of cleverness. It’s a thoroughly entertaining film.

Wait. Did I say that already?

A GAME OF SHADOWS is the type of entertainment that doesn’t ask anything from you except to be comfortable in my seat. Which I was. Sort of. (Some dick entered the movie right as it was starting and sat right in front of me despite there being plenty of open seats all over the place. Why would anyone do that? It wasn’t as bad as the one ultimate assh*le who sat right in front of me for Cloverfield even though I was the ONLY person in the entire theater, but still, how can anyone have such poor theater-going manners?) It’s also the kind of film that doesn’t promise you anything except what you’re expecting to get, and on that it delivers. SHADOWS is like a formulaic TV show writ large; I know what I’m getting from Castle every week, for instance, and it delivers it with seeming ease and aplomb. I don’t knock or mock it for being predictable because I want what it promises.

And what it promises is Robert Downey Jr. being roguishly, charmingly impossible and Jude Law being reluctantly happy to be along for the-

Wait. Did I say that already?

I should probably mention that I have no loyalty to Sherlock Holmes. While I like the Arthur Conan Doyle stories, the detectives of my youth were Scooby Doo and pals, the Hardy Boys, the Three Investigators, and Encyclopedia Brown. I’m happy to get a good Sherlock Holmes story, wherever it comes from, so when the internet lost its mind last month over CBS’ announcement to do a modern Sherlock story set in New York City, I wasn’t the least bit bothered. No matter if Elementary turns out to be awful, it’s not going to effect either the Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes’ stories or the Steven Moffat’s current modern interpretation called Sherlock.

The Sherlock that inhabits Guy Ritchie’s films are designed to play to Downey’s strengths and both films do a wonderful job at that. Here, we’ve got a Holmes who’s convinced that a series of French/German bombings are the work of a shadowy mastermind – Professor James Moriarty (Jared Harris). At the same time, we’ve got a Watson on the verge of marriage to Mary Morstan (Kelly Reilly). The Moriarty subplot seems to be here more for Holmes to have a battle of wits while the Watson subplot is here for Downey to be a rascal.

Both plots work. The first leads to all the action and it’s all really well crafted and exciting. The Moriarty plot creates much of the Watson plot, as it’s Moriarty who insists that Watson be involved in the “game” he and Holmes are playing. The film does engage in a bit too much of the “ha-ha, let us show you how brilliant Holmes has been while you think he was doing something else” routines, but Ritchie does a bang-up keeping everything moving forward.

And that’s it, really. Other than a very memorable, very funny turn from Stephen Fry as Sherlock’s brother Mycroft, there’s not a lot here that I’m going to remember. Jared Harris is very good as Moriarty, but then nearly everyone in the film is very good. There’s just so little of it that’s memorable to me. I’ll buy the Blu ray when it hits the $10 bin and enjoy it again, and then probably just as quickly forget about it.

THE WARD: Alice Hoffman is Trying to Kill Us

The Ward (2011) – Directed by John Carpenter – Starring Amber Heard, Mamie Gummer, Danielle Panabaker, Laura Leigh, Lyndsy Fonseca, Mika Boorem, and Jared Harris.

THE WARD is John Carpenter’s first movie in ten years … and this is where I’m supposed to say something snarky like, “He should have waited another ten if he was going to come back for this. Am I right?”

The truth is, THE WARD isn’t a great movie but it’s a decent movie, and it’s good to have Carpenter back making full-length features. While THE WARD doesn’t rank with his finest efforts, it’s still a solid psychological horror flick about a girl named Kristen (Amber Heard) who gets consigned to a mental ward which is haunted by a ghost named Alice (Mika Boorem).

Kristen burns down a house, gets picked up by the cops, and gets sent to North Bend Psychiatric Hospital, where she meets the other girls in the ward: Artsy Iris (Lyndsy Fonseca), Vain Sarah (Danielle Panabaker), Protective Emily (Mamie Gummer), and Baby-Like Zoey (Laura Leigh). Kristen gets put in Tammy’s old room, and what we know and she doesn’t is that Tammy was killed by a ghost that we eventually learn is Alice.

While Kristen is on the ward, we’re engaged in trying to watch her escape, in watching Dr. Stringer (Jared Harris) do some psychiatric exams, in getting to know the girls, and in watching the ghost start to pick them off one-by-one. All of this is fairly standard fare for a horror flick and while Carpenter films it all with professional aplomb.

But.

But it just doesn’t feel like a Carpenter flick. It feels like any of a 100 directors could have directed this middle sequence. It’s completely solid but there’s none of that great, solid character interaction that makes Carpenter flicks so special. And yet … THE WARD isn’t bad. Carpenter knows how to pace a film and this movie is no exception. I like Kristen’s insistence that she’s not crazy and her determination to get the heck out of this place. Amber Heard is an impressive young actress and she plays Kristen as a well-rounded character who’s strong enough to keep pushing herself to escape and yet not so foolishly strong that she’s not scared out of her mind when she gets taken to electro-shock therapy.

The interaction between the girls and the orderlies and Dr. Stringer and the Alice ghost is pretty good but it’s also largely forgettable.

Things pick up when the girls finally admit to Kristen that the mysterious Alice used to be a patient here but she was really mean to all of them, so they ganged up on her and killed her, and now Alice is out for revenge. It’s a nice twist, muddying up how we think of the girls and how they interact with one another, and it imbues the ghost with a real purpose and motivation for killing these girls.

There’s a second, even better twist coming when we find out that all of these girls are actually the SAME girl: they’re all Alice Hoffman, including Kristen. Kristen has been having these flashes of a little girl tied up in a basement and we discover that girl is Alice. She was kidnapped and abused for 2 months in the house that we saw Kristen burning at the start of the movie, and Alice then splintered her psyche into all these component parts. It’s a cool play on our expectations as an audience; we expect to see a bunch of different types of people in an ensemble cast like this, so we don’t question how each of them seem to be completely different. When Kristen finds out that she’s just one part of a greater whole and has to die for Alice to become whole, I thought it was a pretty good revelation and a pretty good twist that now the ghost that’s been killing the girls is actually the hero. When she kills a girl, it’s because Alice has learned how to integrate that portion of her self back into the whole.

While not a great film and not a signature John Carpenter film, THE WARD is still a solid watch; Carpenter is much better at the character bits than the scary bits and I’m totally fine with that. When I reviewed Drive Angry, I made a big deal about how completely stunningly gorgeous Amber Heard is, but she’s a really good young actress, too. Just like with Drive Angry, she’s better than the material she’s got to work with here, and just like with Drive Angry, Heard’s strength is that she elevates the actors and film around her.