photo credit: gregwake 

Guy Ritchie’s new movie, Sherlock Holmes, (starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law) is a rip-roaring action adventure that surges straight from the screen  into the audience’s imagination.

It is also the first Sherlock Holmes movie to make it to America in 20 years.

Being a Sherlock Holmes expert myself (one boring summer and two volumes worth of Conan Doyle’s work got me through all the stories), I was skeptical of the movie at first.

My concern was that Holmes’ traditional methods of deduction (“The dog did nothing in the nighttime.” “That was the curious incident.”) would be lost under the piles of action in this movie, but that was just a red herring for the movie critics.

However, it was America’s biggest excuse to go to the movies on Christmas Day, as it smashed the box office record for top Christmas Day gross.

The story picks up somewhere in the middle of the partnership between Watson and Holmes. Watson is already planning to marry Miss Morstan (introduced in The Sign of Four), move out of 221 Baker Street, start his own practice, and for all intents and purposes, revert to being boring ol’ Watson.

Robert Downey Jr.’s lively Holmes (or the bad guy, the evil Lord Blackwood, for that mater) don’t allow that.

The writing is intensely clever, and the delivery, as you would expect from the actors, is superb. “How did you know that was there?” Watson says. “Because I was looking for it.”

Jude Law even read most of the books so that he could improvise his dialogue with Conan Doyle’s work.

The movie’s villain is the invention of Hollywood, not Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. But there are plenty of minor characters that make the screen: Irene Adler, the shadowy Professor Moriarty (so shadowy, in fact, that the director refused to name who voiced the character), and even Holmes’ landlady are in their proper places.

Many of the film’s detractors (who have been, you’ll be relieved to know, judo chopped into submission) say that the movie is too much action. “Sherlock Holmes never had a fistfight!” they whine.

But he has, on several occasions. He even learned a form of martial arts to keep the scourge of the London Underworld in line. Sure, he never had to fight against something as sinister as world domination (if you discount the schemes of Moriarty and those pesky Germans, that is).

I’m intrigued to see what Ritchie and our new Holmes work up next. I’ve been dying for a modern adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles for ages. Hopefully I won’t have to wait 20 years for the next one.

(Oh, and if you haven’t seen it yet, do. Showing now at Lakeside Cobb and Lakeland Square cinemas.)