Reviews in the Nick of Time: Many Things Go Crash

This holiday season I’ve actually seen some movies that are still in the theaters! Great blistering barnacles!

First up was Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows.  Nothing wrong with this one except that I didn’t care about the characters, I didn’t care about Moriarty’s plot (which was stupid anyway), I was relieved when Irene died (because she was so awful), and I was in no suspense about the ending, because as soon as I heard the name “Reichenbach,” I knew what the ending was going to be.

Having established the characters in the first movie, the filmmakers let the characters coast on without changing them or finding new ways to make them interesting.  (In all fairness, Conan Doyle did the same thing.)  Jude Law is great as Doctor Watson, and it was a pleasure watching him, but Doctor Watson himself wasn’t very interesting.  And Holmes was clearly on the tail end of a month-long cocaine jag, and was a bit difficult to watch.  Coming to the theater and being confronted with a forty-foot-tall in-your-face coke fiend was an overly confrontational way to spend the holidays.  (Reminded me of Bill Murray’s performance in Scrooged, actually.)

The women were all wasted.  Losing Irene was no loss, but Mary Watson gets thrown from the train very early in the film, and while the filmmakers had the good sense to cast Noomi Rapace (formerly of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo— not ours, but theirs), they really couldn’t find anything interesting to do with her.

And the menace was just . . . silly.  To kill one MD and his wife on their honeymoon, Moriarty sends not one but two squads of assassins, one equipped merely with pistols and knives, and the backup team with rifles, bayonets, a tripod-mounted Maxim gun, and a basket of grenades.  You’d think that shooting up the Royal Scotsman and killing or wounding dozens of passengers would tend to call attention to the evil scheme that you’re trying to keep quiet, but apparently not.

(Moriarty’s scheme, by the way, involves kicking off World War I in 1891.  I leave it to the alternative history enthusiasts among you to work out how that would have gone with no Schlieffen Plan, no real German Navy, no Entente Cordial, no Territorial Army, and no dreadnought battleships.  [The Triple Alliance, however, was already in place.])

With no involvement with the characters or the story, I was left to admire the film’s technical achievements, which were considerable.  The action scenes— of which there were a great many— were consistently imaginative, well choreographed, and with enough CGI and flashy camera work and editing to keep them from ever getting dull.  The design of the movie is gorgeous, and their vision of 1891 was perfectly convincing.  (There were some anachronisms, but I don’t much care.)

I expect the third movie will feature some folks returning from the dead.  Holmes, of course, but we knew that.  Colonel Sebastian Moran was properly kept alive for the next feature.  We don’t know for sure that Moriarty is dead— mastermind that he was, he might have had a submarine waiting for him—  and we only know Irene is dead because Moriarty told us.  So expect some “surprises” along those lines.

Whoops.  Did I give away too much?

Don’t fret, go see The Adventures of Tintin. I should preface my remarks by pointing out that I’m barely familiar with the Tintin oeuvre at all, having read only a single volume of Hergé’s magnum opus.  But from what I could tell, the Spielberg film pretty well captures their spirit and charm.  Light adventure, nonstop action, and a knotty mystery.  Plus expertly-handled 3D, making this the third 3D film in the history of the medium that failed to give me a headache.  This film and Hugo show what 3D can do in the hands of an brilliant filmmaker.  Can we just make a rule that no one is allowed to use 3D who hasn’t been nominated at least three times for Best Picture?

Hergé’s “ligne claire” doesn’t translate well to film, especially 3D film, and except for a few shots (to show he can do it), Spielberg doesn’t try.  Tintin is rendered more realistically than his 2D original, not that this is hard.  The motion capture worked for me.  Even I recognized Tintin’s stalwart supporting cast: Captain Haddock, the bowler-hatted detectives Thompson and Thompson, and the faithful terrier Snowy.

TINTIN: (to landlady)  Call for help!  A man has been shot down on our doorstep!

LANDLADY: What?  Again?

We’re thrown into the action early, and we pretty well stay thrown for the rest of the film.  There are set-piece action scenes in London, on a ship, on an airplane, in the Sahara, in a Moroccan town, and on the London docks— plus a lengthy flashback battle scene between the two-decker Unicorn and a pirate vessel.  (As a former naval historian, I can only remark that the sea battle is not True to Period.)

Normally this much action would send me into fits of boredom— there’s only so much adrenaline I can take before I want to take a nap— but the action here is varied enough and ingenious enough that I stayed interested.  Though the Tintin strips are full of action— or at least the one I read was— a motion picture can just make it so much bigger than a picture drawn on a page.  The duel between two cargo cranes on the East End docks is particularly wonderful.

Spielberg is clearly having a wonderful time, and the movie is full of joking references to other films— I particularly appreciated the scene drawn from Jaws, with Tintin’s quiff standing out of the water like a shark’s fin.

All I can say is, if you’re heading out to see a movie about a detective, make sure he’s the one from Belgium.