Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

In Guy Ritchie’s second Holmes picture the deduction scenes no longer solve a puzzle; they preview the choreography of a fight. That is the film’s real signature, an editing idea that keeps sliding between real time and slow motion, and the forest escape is its most extreme case. In practice the whole picture is built around that sequence. It was shot unusually. Two high speed cameras were mounted side by side, one on a wide lens and one on a long one. Those changes of speed were not achieved on set but assembled afterwards in the cutting room, while the explosions were detonated for real beside the actors and then layered with digital dirt, trees and mortar debris. If the sequence feels exhausting, that is why: its rhythm comes from the edit rather than the shoot. The music was researched just as hard. Reading the Romani characters in the script, Hans Zimmer travelled to Slovakia, listened to bands that had never been professionally recorded, and brought them to a Vienna studio to play the score on their own instruments. Noomi Rapace takes her first English speaking role here. Right for someone who enjoys watching a chase get constructed. Wrong for anyone expecting Holmes to reason a case through to its end.