Sir Doyle’s original vision was realized over a century later.

But hey, that’s cool. I don’t mind the ninja fights and artillery shells turning trees into toothpicks so long as they’re mysterious. Not that A Game of Shadows doesn’t have case-solvin’ – there’s a ton of it – but Holmes seems to do all that stuff without us. When things settle down once in a while, Holmes goes, “Hey guys, I have an elaborate conclusion to tell you! There were all these clues, but I guess you didn’t even get to see because you were jumping trains and dodging gatlin gun fire.”

Good thing the audience has Holmes to solve the mystery for us while we’re busy trying not to get exploded.

But the narrative’s biggest trouble probably is that Holmes and his pals can’t seem to stay in the same country for more tan ten minutes. It’s hard for all the clues, characters, and threads to hang together if every turning point sends us across a continent.

So don’t bother trying to figure it out. Holmes is just going to call on a bunch of stuff the movie never bothered to show you in the first place, and a lot of it is so outrageous that you wouldn’t have thought of it anyway. But he makes it look easy. Holmes is the Bob Ross of detectives.

But hey, Bob Ross was pretty cool!

Does anybody remember this? (comment. you people never comment.)