"I've read and loved every word Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about the brilliant Consulting Detective Sherlock Holmes and his faithful assistant Dr. Watson, and while I've enjoyed some of the movie and TV adaptations, something has always nagged at me.  The world Doyle created seemed somehow more alive with danger and madness than the orderly, polite Baker Streets of Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett's detectives.  To me, the fascination of Holmes is in his bizarre, needy and quite possibly bipolar personality, something that actually made it to the screen most accurately in the Holmes-inspired person of House, M.D.'s Dr. Gregory House.  Until now.  Guy Ritchie has found the Sherlock Holmes I saw when I read the stories:  Robert Downey Jr., who does the honors in a new blockbuster designed specifically for people who filtered the master of deduction through a prism of late-20th century narrative styles.  Sherlock Holmes is large-scale and action-packed, but it holds to Doyle's vision (or at least my vision of it) surprisingly well.  The plot is entertaining enough, though it's really just blockbuster filler.  But the chance to visit a 221B Baker Street so messy and alive was a true delight... Much has been made of the modernizing and rebooting of Doyle's iconic character in Sherlock Holmes, but truth be told, the primary thing Ritchie and his writers (Michael Robert Johnson, Anthony Peckham, Simon Kinberg and  Lionel Wigram) have done is to blow away the dust of generations of other adaptations.  Yes, Downey Jr's Holmes boxes and uses the martial arts, but Doyle referred to both as part of his master detective's skill set in the original stories, which were hardly bereft of action.  And the Case of the Resurrected Lord is still a puzzle only a man of Holmes' mastery of observation and encyclopedic knowledge could hope to solve.  As usual, the clues are in plain sight, but their connections draw upon the botany, cultures and sciences of turn-of-the-century locations throughout Europe and Asia.  In short, good luck solving the case, but once it's solved, I felt satisfied that the writers had played fair, and also that the solution fit well within Holmes' world... Liberties have been taken, of course, juggling the timelines of Holmes, Watson, Mary, Adler and that mysterious Professor to suit its' purposes, but in the process the movie touches upon almost every significant relationship within the Holmes universe.  I was always interested in the Holmes/Watson/Mary quasi-triangle, which is a minor element of the stories but is allowed a richer hashing-out here, and of course fans long-fascinated with Holmes' love/hate relationship with “the woman” Irene Adler get to examine it in more detail without crossing the line into true romance.  The script is also peppered with clever dialog lifts from the stories, in some cases assigned to other characters or contexts...As I mentioned earlier, Downey Jr. is just about perfect as Holmes.  Sloppy, tortured, brilliant and brave, he hits every part of the detective's complex personality and makes it his own.  When he was cast, I thought no other actor could be as well-suited to the role, and I was right.  Ritchie does a great job channeling his trademark cinematic energy into Holmes' process, showing him thinking through fights before they occur in a sort of “genuis-cam”, and staging a bravura sequence where he puts together one of his trademark disguises from found objects while pursuing Irene down an ally.  Not surprisingly, Holmes' drug use didn't make the cut in this PG-13 adaptation, but he's certainly got enough self-destructive habits to not feel watered-down... Watson, always a tougher fellow on the page than he was ever allowed to be on-screen, but Jude Law corrects that imbalance with a vengeance.  The Holmes/Watson relationship here is a bit feistier than the one on the page, but that's a fair concession to changing times, and the core of their mutual trust and loyalty is only enhanced by a little well-placed bickering."