“Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows,” rated PG-13

“Sherlock” (season one), BBC One

While the viewing public goes back to see a sequel because we liked the original and are interested in seeing the story and characters carried on in a similar vein, into something new and surprising and even better, filmmakers instead treat sequels like some sort of victory lap, a madcap reunion party of all the people who made the first movie, and as a reward they got money to make a second one and they’re all so happy they show up drunk or high and just throw something together that looks like it might have been fun to make, but hoo boy it sure doesn’t make much sense.

While it has a few good moments, the new Guy Ritchie film “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows,” is ultimately just another sequel sucker punch, with all the attributes of the first film dialed up to 11 and little story to be found. Where the 2009 version was fun for the edge of manic humor that Robert Downey Jr. brought to the brilliant detective, in this one it’s jokes all the way down and Holmes seems not brilliant-on-the-edge-of-madness, but simply insane. In the first movie, the 19th-century bachelor chemistry between Downey and Jude Law as Watson was fun to watch and verged on the homoerotic, but in this one we actually get Holmes running around in a dress, and at one point Watson gets his head jammed between Holmes’s legs for further hilarity. And while the clever use of bullet-time to take us into the lethally fast mind of the famous detective was effective in the original, in the sequel time is sped up, slowed down, stopped and reversed to such incessant excess that instead of taking us inside the mind of a genius, it feels like we’re trapped inside a movie that’s on cocaine.

It’s one thing not to take yourself seriously, it’s another thing entirely to cast Stephen Fry as Mycroft Holmes and then have him walk around drinking tea naked; it’s funny, you bet, but does it make a good Sherlock Holmes movie? (The answer is no.)

Amidst all this madness and mayhem, Jared Harris (“Mad Men,” “Fringe”) as a very quiet and serious Moriarty actually works well—he must be dangerous if he actually speaks at a normal pace and doesn’t flit backwards and forwards through time when he walks across a room. Unfortunately, the story in the first half of the movie is so muddled that it’s not even clear why Holmes is chasing him, and so Harris’s excellent gravity as the archest of arch-villains suffers from the lack of story to support it.

Even though a great creative team might make a good movie the first time out, bring them back for a sequel and they inevitably lose their minds.

Wait a minute… not inevitably. In 2010 BBC One aired three 90-minute episodes of a new adaptation of the famous detective called simply “Sherlock,” and all three were excellent.

Created by Mark Gatiss and Stephen Moffat (recently at the helm of “Doctor Who”), this interpretation thrived without star power or explosions yet brought plenty of creative fireworks to the Sherlock Holmes legacy. With Benedict Cumberbatch (a name not to be forgotten after this) as Holmes and Martin Freeman as Watson, the series updates the original Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories into present-day London, and present-day television, with strokes that are so elegant and smart that they feel as inevitable as Holmes’ own deductions. Of course Holmes would send Watson a text instead of a telegraph; of course Watson, instead of publishing their adventures in a magazine, would keep a blog, part of his prescribed therapy as an Afghanistan war vet.

No defense is needed for bringing Holmes into the present, anyway, since the stories weren’t written as period pieces in the first place. In this series, at least, bringing them into our world has been like scraping off layers of old paint and shellac to reveal the natural grain of the characters and stories beneath.

Cumberbatch immediately earned his place as one of the great Sherlocks of the screen. Brilliant and unsettling, heroic and off-putting, all the great Holmes attributes are there: genius, addiction, obsession, contempt, asexuality, arrogance. Freeman’s Watson, in turn, tempers the character in all the right ways: part caretaker, part observer, part lackey and foil and friend.

The character of Sherlock Holmes persists in our age because he is a perfect hero for it, the master of every situation by virtue solely of his command of information in a chaotic and quickly changing world. His genius, though, puts him right on the edge of madness, and his heroism lies in being able to look into the heart of it all and not succumb to insanity.

It’s hard for any creative team to maintain a character who is smarter than themselves. Guy Richie’s team fell to madness; will Moffat’s? BBC One’s “Sherlock” will be back for three more episodes starting in January 2012, and while they might lose their minds, the safe money is on more awesomeness.