Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on March 2012

Elementary (-school level), my dear Watson. If you go to movies to see car (buggy) chases, elaborate fisticuffs and stuff getting blown up a lot, you’ll find all that here. But, as with the 2009 “original,” if you subtract the star power of Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law (whose clever interactions are becoming a bit twee), what you have left is overproduced, off-the-shelf and repetitive action-movie dazzle. And compared to what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote more than a century ago, there’s zero suspense, mystery or intrigue. Chuckle: Stephen Fry baring it all as Holmes’s oddball brother Mycroft.