Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
Guy Ritchie is a flash director who has an uncanny talent for making impressive movies that aren’t any good – RocknRolla (2008) is an obvious exception. Perhaps it’s time he was tapped on the shoulder and politely told that it is not all about him. Or, in the words of A O Scott of the New York Times, ‘can a movie be hyperactive and lazy at the same time? Clever and idiotic?’ Most certainly it can. Making old entertainments relevant to modern, if not necessarily more discerning audiences is a critical priority for anybody who doesn’t want to do their dough cold, but Ritchie’s speedfreak adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories blasts the whodunnit intrigue out of the famous detective’s investigations. Apart from being too short for the part, Robert Downey as Holmes swans through the shebang on auto-pilot, his roguish charisma wearing thin at an early stage, while Jude Law likewise opts for caricature in his too-swashbuckling portrayal of Doctor Watson. Both men are clearly happy to be pocketing their substantial wages but they fail miserably at creating the genuine warmth that is so engaging in the better buddy flicks (the bar set by Butch and Sundance is way beyond them). As I did in the first instalment of what threatens to be a long and tedious franchise, I wondered what might have been had the roles been reversed – physically it would certainly have been more convincing. The criminal genius Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris) is involved in fomenting war in Europe, but the subtlety and fiendish scheming that underpins his adversarial relationship with Holmes is buried beneath layer upon layer of show-offy CGI. Worst of all is the constant brawling, with every turn in the plot apparently designed to set up the next round of flamboyant fisticuffs. NB – I saw this at Sydney’s Verona only hours after watching Michael Clarke amass 329 not out against the Indians. By comparison, with its stupefying brashness and mindless machismo, the film quickly became a thundering bore.
 

The Adventures of Tintin
I’d be surprised if Tintin, Hergé’s young Belgian reporter, had much of a readership in Australia. The graphic novels (of which I boast no great knowledge) have always seemed Euro-quaint in a way that might never cater to the West’s fondness for butch masculinity – I mean, the bloke has no girl and is accompanied on his adventures by a little white dog, for gawd’s sake! But with Steven Spielberg at the helm and Peter Jackson producing (he will direct the sequel), a box-office juggernaut is assured. Kicking off at a Brussels in what looks like the 1950s (everybody speaks English), Tintin buys the model of an old sail-ship in which has been hidden a mysterious torn sheet from a manuscript that will lead to pots of seventeenth century gold. The search for the missing segments of the manuscript, while they are being pursued by villains, takes Tintin and Snowy, his delightful mutt, on to the open seas, where they are befriended by Captain Haddock, an alcoholic Scottish tar, and thence to the postcard kingdom of Morocco, via an encounter with soldiers of the French Foreign Legion (who, thankfully, haven’t changed since the days of Abbott and Costello). Technically, the film has been shot in ‘motion capture’, a digital process that creates images more convincing than conventional animation without being totally lumbered by reality – it’s the ultimate trick of the fantasist. The result is so visually intoxicating that the plot’s twists and turns are of only secondary interest. The character of Tintin himself (voiced by Jamie Bell), a boy-man, is a bit of a blank, but Haddock (Andy Serkis) is fully engaging and Snowy – well, for mine he’s the star of the movie. A minute more would have been too many; John Williams’s score pounds the listener to the point of exhaustion and so rapidly does the action move from one crisis to the next that you just don’t get time to catch your breath, but otherwise it is impossible not to be enchanted by the exquisite imagery.