Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1515091/
I am a bit disappointed by the new Sherlock Holmes movie on many counts, alas. Loved the first film with a passion that if not exactly fiery was certainly sincere: good characters, suitably convoluted plot, some well handled set pieces, genuinely both funny and dramatic, which is surprisingly hard to do well, very good pace sustained over a fairly long movie, some fabulous special effects, especially those involving Sherlock's ability to think through the moves of an encounter in advance - all in all, hard to fault, added to which the sound design (again, especially in relation to Sherlock's thinking through) was gorgeous and the music was, if not the most fantastically lovely score ever written, nonetheless full of character and very original in its timbral palette (and ruthlessly pastiched - I hesitate to say ripped off - by the BBC's TV series, broadcast shortly after).
The second film is a poor copy in almost every respect. Irene Adler, one of the most interesting characters of the first film, is written off in the first ten minutes and female interest is taken over mostly by Simsa, a gypsy woman, who never really gets a chance to be much more than a plot device (although the newly married Mary Watson has a couple of great scenes, not least with the sublimely naked Stephen Fry as Mycroft, and her dry wit on discovering that there is a second Holmes is one of my fabourite lines in the film). The only competitor for the humour of the first film is Sherlock's attempt to develop a new type of urban camouflage, which is so utterly ridiculous that it has to be seen to be believed. Literally.
Musically, it's all very bitty. The first time I saw it (yes, indeed, went back in order to listen properly) it seemed rather nondescript and mostly what I noticed were the moments when the Sherlock theme from the first film came thumping in (and boy, did it thump); and the again delicious sound design which is playful and unusual in the way it distorts, exaggerates and represents the likely sound of an event in a very abstract way, bordering more on electroacoustic composition at times than sound design in the more traditional, foley sense. On second listening, there are musical themes, principally a Moriarty theme that grumbles away in the bass every time we see him or someone talks about him (yawn); rather less of the Sherlock theme than I expected, just occasionally so thumpy that it's all I remembered from first viewing; and what I think may be an Irene Adler theme that therefore disappears after the first 10 minutes once she exits the story and is never heard again. But the are lots and lots of individual ideas in cues that appear once (occasionally twice in quick succession) and are then abandoned, and this keeps going right the way through, including two brand new ideas in the last ten minutes of the film.
Granted, I have no doubt that pretty much no one except me and the other fusty old purists even noticed this, but to a fusty old purist such as I it seems both very uneconomical and actually rather lazy. Why keep inventing new (not hugely interesting) material when you have perfectly good existing themes that can be reworked and reinvented to bring more depth to the overall narrative? For example, I don't think I'm giving too much away when I say the film's climax is the original Conan Doyle plot device of Sherlock sacrificing himself to defeat Moriarty by throwing himself, with the villain, into the Reichenbach falls. Hans Zimmer gives us brand new music for this (which he's borrowed from something I can't place, incidentally). But musically, wouldn't it be much more logical and satisfying to use a transformed but recognisable version of Sherlock's own theme? Takes more thought and work and imagination, perhaps, but that's the type of thing that makes film music really good and interesting and meaningful, and why people employ a particular composer to score a film rather then just using stock cues from music libraries. Hey ho. OK, rant over. Loved the sound design, and it passed a reasonably entertaining couple of hours, but alas, I think Mr Zimmer does not actually know how to score a sequel (I know everyone was terribly impressed by Dark Knight, but again it was a very lazy score and not a patch on his Batman Begins).
One other interesting thing in this film is that there are a number of set musical pieces: various Lieder about fish (which ties in well with various things going on in the plot, including poor old Sherley (as Mycroft calls him) getting rather hideously hooked by Moriarty at one point; but less explicably, have an Irish reel as the music for a set piece fight involving a Kossack, a French gypsy and Sherlock, and a little bit of Don Giovanni later on which didn't quite work: it seemed to be trying to make a connection between the plot of Mozart's opera and the events going on in the film at that point, but I couldn't work out what (and I'm the blasted musicologist in the audience!).