Moriarty

To me, the biggest disappointment came from Professor Moriarty.

No, it has nothing to do with Jared Harris, who did strike a fine balance between presenting as the original professor of mathematics under Conan Dolye and playing the role of an ambitious Napoleon of crime under Guy Ritchie.

But, it was all wrong. The personal history was not correct. (See the original description in The Final Problem: He is a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty. At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the binomial theorem which has had a European vogue. On the strength of it, he won the mathematical chair at one of our smaller universities, and had, to all appearances, a most brilliant career before him. But the man had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers. Dark rumours gathered round him in the University town, and eventually he was compelled to resign his chair and come down to London.)

And, even worse, the personality of this friend of the Prime Minister in the movie does not only differ from the original resigned professor, his plots are so ingenuous that he could hardly be a real harm to the world - Robert Downey just over-reacted.

PS. In contrast, Jude Law made such beautiful deductions and decisions in the Switzerland Summit that he could not have been the real Dr. Watson.

Guy Ritchie should put Mycroft Holmes to find out whom Rene was disguising.