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Depending on your allegiance to Arthur Conan Doyle, tolerance for Guy Ritchie, and taste in big action flicks, you may find Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law are the best things about this Sherlock Holmes makeover, or the only good things. Either way, their jolly buddy-banter is a lot of fun.

[The following a REPRINT of the redblog review of Sherlock Holmes on its theatrical release last December. Sherlock Holmes is now available for rental in the redboxes.]

Director Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law playing the legendary detective and his sidekick/biographer as bickering buddy cops, is a very good time. Not that it’s perfect—it’s still a processed, “big dumb,” action event, and those kind of large, lumbering films too often feel like “fun machines”–trying to pound and grind pained grins out of the audience.

But Sherlock Holmes also has a not-so-secret weapon: Robert Downey Jr. meshes easily with Ritchie’s usual hyper-kinetic bluster and bravado and, as he did in Iron Man, deftly transmutes the big-budget demands of a tent-pole franchise (and its bloated, common-denominator impulses) into something lighter and more lovable.

Like his fellow acting eccentric and Magnetic-Weirdo Movie Star Johnny Depp, Downey doesn’t let the fact he’s much more talented than the material give him pause or shame. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous character gave birth to both Batman and Dr. Gregory House, MD, and they’re both folded back into this new Holmes. Downey plays the great detective as two-fisted as the Dark Knight and as sardonic as the anti-social doc.

Jude Law often gets cast as a self-pleased cad, but the period setting and Watson’s costumes serve Law well, and his mix of stout bruising and aloof disapproval plays perfectly off Downey—the two actors’ chemistry is so perfectly Butch and Sundance it rides smoothly and delightfully over any bumps.

Ritchie has ditched the exquisite Limey profanity and Tarantino-esque slapstick violence of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch for the PG-13 safety of Blockbusterville, and he’s rolled his usual London underworld crime scene back a century–but the bullying Ritchie energy and verve pulses throughout Sherlock Holmes.

Still, this action-film Holmes is respectful–in its own caffeinated way–to Conan Doyle’s tremendous literary output. Granted it’s not as much about cerebral feats of deduction as it is about adrenaline-fueled action. But Conan Doyle’s creation isn’t lost amid the flash and noise. The stories’ details and core spirit are there, if executed at a somewhat more brisk clip than the prose’s stately drawing-room pace.

The new film is a bachelor-pals jaunt, but so were the stories. Downey strips down to his waist to engage in some brutal bare-knuckled boxing, but the literary Watson often wrote of Holmes’ fighting prowess. This is not Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett’s film/TV adaptations of the Holmes stories, and maybe Conan Doyle’s Holmes wasn’t quite the quipping smart-arse Downey’s is, but the sleuth of the stories did often slip into a slovenly, melancholy ennui when his formidable mind had no case to chew over.

Plot-wise, the film is pure cineplex boilerplate—unlike the written tales, the focus really isn’t on sorting out the clues and revealing the mystery. (When was the last time you found yourself truly caring about the whodunit or plot resolution at the center of a blockbuster action film? You won’t start here.)

Mark Strong, so instantly memorable in Body of Lies, is the Big Bad, but the actor’s rich menace and imposing confidence is pitted on a somewhat dull Stock Villain stick. His Lord Blackwood serves his purpose as the master of the film’s infernal plot engine, but despite attempts to make him a Victorian mix of Hannibal Lector and the real-life Great Beast, Aleister Crowley, he mostly comes off as a puffed-up manqué.

And because all these sorts of blockbusters must have an alluring love interest, Rachel McAdams is pushed, pulled, and laced into the role of Irene Adler, Holmes’ daunting female foil from one of Doyle’s stories. Unfortunately, as is too often the case in these sorts of movies, Sherlock Holmes literally does not have time to do much with McAdams’ usual twinkling charms—Adler has been left on the cutting-room floor in order to make more room for Holmes and Watson’s domestic bickering.

(Although Eddie Marsan from Happy-Go-Lucky manages to sneak in amidst the mayhem and carve out a nice little performance as Inspector Lestrade.)

While it hurts to see McAdams reduced to sassy eye candy, you can understand why Ritchie keeps the focus on Downey and Law. They may be dashing about London to dig up clues and fight crime as Sherlock Holmes’ plot clanks along on steampunk gears and wheels, but the real story is that Watson has found a Yoko who threatens to break up their merry bachelor-detective bromance. Holmes’ petulant jealousy over Watson’s engagement provides much riper material than Blackwood’s nefarious schemes.

Tucked into the corners are small delights; St. Paul’s by a gloomy London night, plenty of PG-13 murders most foul and gruesome corpses, and a shadowy glimpse of a certain professorial Napoleon of Crime teasing us for what could be a much better, more centered and confident Holmes 2.

For now, Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes may fall short of being a “great” movie through and through, but thanks to the panache of Downey and Law, it’s one we’ll be re-watching over and over in the coming years.

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