Lie down with me, Watson!” beseeches a bare-chested Robert Downey Jr. to Jude Law midway through Guy Ritchie’s follow-up to his 2009 Conan Doyle makeover. Hmm: is Britain’s most celebrated literary sleuth about to swap 221b Baker Street for Brokeback Mountain?
OK, so the line in question arrives in the middle of a locomotive stand-off, with Holmes and Watson only going supine to avoid a hail of Grenadier bullets ripping through a train carriage. But even through the cordite, the whiff of homoeroticism is hard to miss in a film that often forgoes deductive mystery in favour of unabashed man-love.
Witness the scene in which a dole-faced RDJ stands morosely by as Law walks down the aisle with his betrothed (Kelly Reilly), or another in which Watson labours manfully, and tearfully, to haul a wounded Holmes back from the brink of death. (God only knows what stops him administering the kiss of life.)
Small wonder Noomi Rapace barely gets a look-in as the gypsy fortune teller who joins them on their travels, this girl needing rather more than a dragon tattoo to draw Sherlock’s gaze.
Yet as close as Rob and Jude get as they pursue an international conspiracy from London and Paris to Switzerland, there’s an even more intriguing relationship in A Game Of Shadows: that between Sherlock and his fabled nemesis Moriarty, played with suavity and silky menace by Mad Men’s Jared Harris.
Not only does this ensure Holmes 2 is an improvement on its predecessor, it also lends welcome dramatic heft to a film that might otherwise be defined by its smirking insouciance – not to mention present Holmes with an adversary who is his intellectual as well as physical equal.
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