I was a big Sherlock Holmes fan when I was a kid, but my fandom had more to do with the movies than with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Oh, I'd read a few collections and I still own a hardcover edition of The Complete Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes (featuring the entire Holmes canon as it originally appeared in London's The Strand magazine), but it was Basil Rathbone who first captured my imagination with a series of Holmes films produced from 1939-1946. (I caught them on New York's WPIX-11 TV station back in the 1980s. My favorites: The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.) From those black-and-white classics I moved on to Nicholas Rowe in 1985's Stephen Spielberg-produced Young Sherlock Holmes still my favorite treatment of Sherlock on film.
Director Guy Ritchie (Snatch, RocknRolla) made the very smart decision to cast Robert Downey Jr. as the consulting detective in his big-budget launch of what will surely be a Holmes franchise. Red-hot these days, Downey continues his winning streak and finds something fresh in the most old-fashioned of characters. Jude Law is along for the ride as Holmes' faithful assistant Dr. Robert Watson, and the leads share a winning chemistry that overcomes weaknesses in plot and special effects to make Sherlock Holmes an energetic and fun reinvention of a literary classic.