SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS

There are a myriad varieties of pain: physical, anything from an ingrown toenail to a bullet wound; psychological, the mind can be just as fractured as a bone; broken heart, a bloodless, agonizing gash that can be fatal.

“Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows” corners the market on the blindly, excruciating, bludgeoning pain of BOREDOM! This film is a travesty from an industry that should know better. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) must be somersaulting  in his tomb over the bastardization of his beloved “Holmes” and “Dr. Watson”; both characters a composite of a university professor (Holmes) and himself as Watson; Doyle was a doctor.

I did not care for the first “Sherlock Holmes” but this supercilious, ridiculous rendition of intelligent, sly, dignified sleuths is an embarrassment and diminishment of the talents of Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law. Naomi Rapace (“Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”) is inconsequential, miscast and irrelevant to the even more irrelevant plot.

The convoluted mission and silly survival scenes render a shadowy, doomed conclusion; a third “Sherlock Holmes”  threatens to rear its frightful, boring specter, tormenting an audience seeking entertainment, encountering meaningless, mind-anesthetizing misery.

1/2 STAR

For Now…………Peneflix