All guns blazing for a boy's own adventure

Dir: Guy Ritchie

With: Robert Downey Jr, Jude Law, Noomi Rapace

THE success of Guy Ritchie's first Sherlock Holmes film might have puzzled even the doyen of detectives himself. Here was a director known for Brit geezer films (Lock, Stock, Rocknrolla) remaking a classic English tale, and with an American in the lead. Was Sherlock about to trade Harris tweed for black leather, Baker Street sangfroid for Beverly Hills dash?

Ritchie, with considerable aid from Robert Downey Jr as Holmes, pulled it off by making his Sherlock a swaggering fop, a little bit hammy, a lot likeable, and just traditional enough. Here, in this second, superior, instalment, Ritchie ramps up the campness to pantomime levels. In A Game of Shadows, boys just wanna have fun, and they do. Involving city breaks, drinking, gambling, a few hairy escapes and lots of antler locking, this is not so much a movie as a stag weekend.

Ritchie tempers matters with the addition of two new, cerebral characters: Stephen Fry playing Sherlock's brother, and the Royal Shakespeare Company's Jared Harris as Professor Moriarty. That said, he still overdoes things on the designer violence, get your guns out for the lads front. If you can bear that, there's plenty of fun to be had when this game is afoot.

The year is 1891. Europe is being rattled to its foundations by a series of bombings. The art of diplomacy is being undermined by shadowy presences intent on spreading alarm. As they never tire of saying in East End boozers, cui bono from such anarchy?

In trying to solve the mystery, a now solo Holmes is making less progress than he would like. Much to his bewilderment and near horror, his old mucker Dr Watson (Jude Law) is preparing to swap bromance with Holmes for marriage to a woman. But not before Holmes has enlisted his services for one last case.

Therein lies the tale which turns into an action-packed caper. The first picture's convoluted story has been replaced by a streamlined and simple yarn, thereby allowing Ritchie to play to the franchise's strengths – its characters – and pile on the action.

Law makes a satisfying foil to Downey Jr's lusty Holmes. While a buttoned up sort he is not too strait-laced. Then there is the consulting detective himself. Downey Jr plays him as an exotic mix of cool logic and raging dissipation. As he explains to an acquaintance, he sees "everything". That is his genius, his curse, and the reason why he can solve riddles that would make lesser logicians despair.

To this pairing, Ritchie adds a couple of belting new characters in the form of Stephen Fry's Mycroft Holmes and Jared Harris's Moriarty. How nice for Fry to land the part as Sherlock's brother. It has been, oh, all of 30 seconds since he last turned up in a quiz show, documentary, or other television programme. Some of us were beginning to wonder how on Earth poor Mr Fry was going to pay the mortgage this month. If you think that's sarky, tune into Fry's Mycroft, a diplomat with a silver, forked tongue and the ability to call his brother "Sherly" and get away with it.

Even better than Fry, a rival to Downey Jr's Holmes indeed, is Jared Harris's Moriarty. To play "the Napoleon of crime", Ritchie has turned to, what else, a stalwart of the English theatre. When you need a drop of poisonous skulduggery, a menacing tone and a convincing way with a threat, only an English actor will do. Write the name "Jared Harris" in raven black ink next to Sir Anthony Hopkins's Hannibal Lecter and Sir Ian McKellen's Magneto.

There's just about room for several women in Ritchie's caper, including Noomi Rapace, late of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as a gypsy who helps Holmes and Watson track anarchist plotters. The rest – Rachel McAdam's Irene Adler, Geraldine James as Holmes's landlady, Watson's wife – are mere shadows that flirt and strut and nag their way across the stage for a brief time. The Holmes stories remain a man's world, where the love of a good woman has its place but only a small one, and only as a plot driver.

Ritchie is more interested in action than amour. Whenever he can, and often when he should not, he reaches for a slo-mo, effects-laden, all guns blazing chase or fight sequence. Failing that, he'll plump for an explosion loud enough to rattle your fillings. At times it's like watching The Matrix set in Victorian times. Holmes's purists might hate what he has done with the old place but he certainly knows how to construct an action scene. There is no danger of falling asleep here.

It's not all boys and their toys, there are some cute visual gags as well, but the action is paramount. You know the Ritchie methods by now, and in the legend of Holmes he has found a happy home for them.