It helps that the way Jared Harris plays the character is so completely unconventional. It’s the battle between Holmes and Moriarty that matters most, and that’s achieved with a kind of subtle cinematic brilliance you’d never expect from a director like Guy Ritchie. Though Noomi fits into the story at first, eventually it begins to feel as though she’s only there because A Game of Shadows needed a woman to fill out some pre-determined gender quota. She does well but the film quickly becomes so consumed with the battle of wits between Moriarty and Holmes that she soon fades into the back ground as more of a tag-along. She plays a gypsy, tangled up in the events of A Game of Shadows for the sake of her brother. Then there’s Noomi Rapace, the Holmes’ world’s new female lead. Holmes has unraveled almost all of Moriarty’s evil plot before the movie’s even halfway through, the real story here is in finding a way to stop him, and doing that proves to be a different matter entirely. That makes the challenge presented by this particular bad guy different than any other the world’s greatest detective will ever encounter. In anyone else that kind of confidence would be dismissed as arrogance, but in the case of Professor James Moriarty it’s simply true. Utterly ruthless and supremely brilliant, Moriarty knows there’s nothing anyone can do to stop him. Jared Harris plays him like a man so confident in his abilities, that he doesn’t care who knows what he’s doing.
#Sherlock holmes game of movie#
It’s appropriate that the film’s trailers have made no secret of the fact that Moriarty is in the movie because Moriarty himself operates almost entirely out in the open. You know by now that in this sequel he faces off against Moriarty, perhaps the most famous villain of all time, with apologies to Darth Vader and Khan. That this is the best Sherlock Holmes movie so far is appropriate, since it’s centered around the great detective’s most challenging case.