Sherlock Holmes Is Stupidly Fun

You won't find much food for thought in the new Sherlock Holmes film, but is that any surprise? Instead, A Game of Shadows offers more zany action and amusing banter:

• "I could not entirely resist the idiotic allure of Game of Shadows," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. The series "has loosed the most unhinged, unkempt and unclean version of Conan Doyle’s legendary detective ever seen." But "even at his dumbest," Robert Downey Jr.'s Holmes is "semi-irresistible."

• "Can a movie be hyperactive and lazy at the same time? Clever and idiotic?" asks AO Scott in the New York Times. "There is a plot, but no real intrigue, mystery or suspense, and no inkling of anything at stake beyond a childish and belligerent idea of fun."
• The film's biggest problem is "a messy execution, saved in the nick of time by the—let’s call it what it is—overtly campy flirting between Holmes and his friend and biographer, Dr. Watson," played by Jude Law, writes Joe Neumaier in the New York Daily News.
• In the Hollywood Reporter, Todd McCarthy calls the film "an elaborate entertainment that whooshes along." When it "finally gets down to the business of a climax, it becomes not half-bad."

(More Sherlock Holmes stories.)