I’m going to use the wikipedia movie summaries so that I don’t get events from one confused with the other with my comments throughout. I believe this to be Robert Downey and Jude Law’s best roles. Here’s the first one.
In 1890 London, private detective Sherlock Holmes and his partner Dr. John Watson prevent the ritualistic murder
The worst kind of murder
of a woman by Lord Henry Blackwood, a noble who has killed five women previously and claims to have supernatural powers. Inspector Lestrade and the police arrest Blackwood.
Who is some how able to be placed in prison without incident. He has weird magical powers, or is just really good at chemestry.
Two months later, Watson, engaged to Mary Morstan, is moving out of 221B Baker Street and ending his partnership with Holmes, exhausted of his eccentricities. Blackwood summons Holmes before he is hanged and warns him that three more deaths will occur that he cannot stop. Blackwood is subsequently hanged and pronounced dead by Watson.
He’s not actually dead though, due to modefications to his rope that leave physics on his side.
Holmes is visited by former adversary Irene Adler, who asks him to find a missing man named Luke Reordan.
He’s dead.
Holmes follows her when she leaves and observes she is working for a man who Holmes deduces is a professor, and that he intimidates Adler.
His other nemesis.
Blackwood’s tomb is found broken into and Reordan’s corpse is inside his coffin. Following a series of clues from the body, Holmes and Watson find Reordan’s lab and discover experiments attempting to merge science with magic. Later Holmes is abducted and brought to the Temple of the Four Orders, a secret magical fraternity. The Order head Lord Chief Justice Sir Thomas Rotheram introduces Holmes to U.S. Ambassador Standish and Home Secretary Lord Coward, and they ask Holmes to stop Blackwood, a former member of the society and Rotheram’s secret illegitimate son. That night, Rotheram drowns in his bath
That was wild.
as Blackwood watches. Coward calls a meeting of the Order and nominates Blackwood to take command of it, and Blackwood reveals himself to them. When he explains his plan to seize control of the British Empire and reconquer the United States, Standish attempts to shoot him but bursts into flames when he fires his gun, and flees out a window to his death.
Holmes studies the rituals of the Order and recognizes that Blackwood’s murders have been in accordance with their beliefs, and his final act will be to murder the members of Parliament. With the aid of Lestrade, Holmes surrenders and is taken to Coward, where he sees evidence on his clothes to deduce that Blackwood has conducted a ceremony in the sewers beneath the Palace of Westminster. Holmes escapes and enters the sewers with Watson and Adler, who find Blackwood’s men guarding a device developed by Reordan, designed to release cyanide gas into the Parliament chambers and kill all but Blackwood’s supporters, to whom he has secretly given an antidote. Blackwood comes before Parliament and announces their impending deaths, then attempts to activate the cyanide device by remote control; Adler is able to deactivate it with a controlled explosion and takes the canisters of cyanide. Coward and Blackwood’s supporters are apprehended as Blackwood flees Parliament.
Holmes chases Adler and she leads him to the top of the incomplete Tower Bridge, where Blackwood incapacitates Adler and then fights Holmes.
How did he get so good at fighting. Especially with the big guy who was also in Get Smart?
Blackwood falls through the scaffolding and Holmes reveals he has deduced that all of his supposed supernatural feats were achieved through science and theatrical trickery, aided by Reordan’s experiments. A crane collapses, causing Blackwood to be ensnared and hanged in chains off the bridge. Holmes revives Adler, who tells him that her employer is Professor Moriarty, and he is not to be underestimated.
As Watson moves out of 221B, a police constable reports to Holmes that a dead officer was found near Blackwood’s device. Moriarty used the confrontations with Adler and Blackwood as a diversion while he took a key component, based on the infant science of radio, from the machine. Holmes considers the case reopened.
How did they manage to have electricity for the saw but not anything else in the movie.
Here’s the second one. Sherlock Holmes Game of Shadows
n 1891, a series of bombings blamed on political radicals bring France and Germany to the brink of war. Detective Sherlock Holmes narrowly intercepts one such bomb instead intended for expert surgeon Dr. Hoffmanstahl and Holmes’ former lover Irene Adler. Holmes explains the true culprit to be Adler and Hoffmanstahl’s employer, Professor James Moriarty, who has the two assassinated after they flee the scene. Holmes discloses to his friend, Dr. John Watson, that he has connected seemingly unrelated murders, terrorist attacks, and business acquisitions to Moriarty.
After meeting with his brother Mycroft at Watson’s bachelor party, Holmes meets with Romani fortune-teller Madame Simza, the intended recipient of the letter he took from Adler, sent by her brother René. He defeats an assassin sent to kill her, but she flees.
They’re finally going to get married.
After the wedding of Watson and Mary Morstan, Holmes meets Moriarty for the first time. Moriarty taunts him about murdering Adler and threatens to kill Watson and Mary due to Holmes’ interference, while the detective vows to defeat him.
Moriarty’s men
That professor was up to no good.
ambush Watson and Mary on a train to their honeymoon in Brighton. Holmes throws Mary from the train into a river, where she is rescued by Mycroft. After defeating Moriarty’s men, Holmes and Watson travel to Paris and locate Simza. Holmes tells her she has been targeted because René is working for Moriarty and may have told her his plans.
Simza takes the pair to the headquarters of an anarchist group to which she and René belonged, and which has been forced to plant bombs for Moriarty. The trio follows Holmes’ deduction that the bomb is in the Paris Opera. It is actually in a nearby hotel, where it kills several businessmen – a cover-up for the assassination of Alfred Meinhard by Sebastian Moran, expert sharpshooter and henchman to Moriarty. Meinhard’s death grants Moriarty ownership of the former’s arms factory in Heilbronn.
The trio follow Moriarty to Germany. At the factory, Moriarty captures, interrogates, and tortures Holmes while Watson fights Moran. Holmes spells out Moriarty’s plot, revealing that the Professor acquired shares in multiple war profiteering companies and intends to instigate a world war to make himself a fortune.
Watson uses a cannon to destroy the watchtower in which Moran is concealed. The structure collapses into the warehouse where Moriarty is holding Holmes captive. Watson, Simza, and Holmes soon escape. Once out of the factory, Holmes deduces that Moriarty’s final goal will be to create an international incident at a peace summit in Switzerland. At the summit, Holmes deduces that René is the assassin disguised as one of the ambassadors, having been given radical reconstructive surgery by Hoffmanstahl.
Holmes and Moriarty meet on a balcony to discuss their plans over a game of chess. Watson and Simza stop René’s assassination attempt, but René is killed by Moran. Despite his war being averted, Moriarty remains confident in his victory, predicting to Holmes that the nations of Europe will inevitably go to war with one another. Holmes reveals that, while being tortured by Moriarty, he replaced the professor’s personal diary that contained his plans and financing with a duplicate, whilst the original was sent to Mary, who decrypted the code using a book Holmes had noticed in Moriarty’s office, before passing the information to Inspector Lestrade, who seizes Moriarty’s assets and donates his fortune to charities for war widows and orphans.
Holmes and Moriarty anticipate a fight, and both realise that Moriarty will win due to Holmes’ injured shoulder. With Moriarty vowing to kill Watson and Mary, Holmes drags him over the balcony just as Watson arrives, and the two fall into the Reichenbach Falls.
Following Holmes’s funeral, Watson and Mary prepare to have their belated honeymoon when the doctor receives a package containing Mycroft’s breathing device, which Sherlock noticed before the summit. Realising that Holmes may be alive, Watson leaves his office to ask Mary about the delivery man; while Holmes, having concealed himself, reads Watson’s memoirs on the typewriter and adds a question mark after the words “The End”.
Best ending.
Also, they’re all brawlers who happen to have respectable jobs.