Fans of the original four Holmes novels and 56 stories will no doubt, rightly, be appalled. Aside from names and a few minor details, little binds this movie to the characters and events of Conan Doyle's fiction. Where the Holmes of print was fastidious to a fault, Downey's character leaves a trail of physical destruction. Where Conan Doyle's hero was cold and introverted, Downey's Sherlock is a histrionic rakehell. The mode of the original character, in fact, was not breakneck adventurism at all: In Conan Doyle's telling, Holmes was a consummate scientist who did his best work alone in an armchair. "It always annoyed me how in the old-fashioned story, the detective always seemed to get at his results either by some lucky chance, or luck, or else it was quite unexplained how he got there," Conan Doyle once said. His goal was to create a sleuth whose genius lay not in his street smarts but in his skill working entirely—and transparently—from data.

“My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so,” Sherlock Holmes tells his sidekick Dr. Watson at the conclusion of Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Red-Headed League.” It’s one of Doyle’s periodic hints that his hero uses his brilliance to placate a tortured psyche. Doyle’s most famous character has an unparalleled genius for detection, but he’s also kind of a mess, a drug-abusing weirdo kept from turning into a total recluse only by Watson’s friendship and a steady parade of mysteries making their way up the steps of 221B Baker Street.
Robert Downey Jr. sounds that self-destructive eccentricity as a keynote from his first appearance in Sherlock Holmes, and his twitchy, winning performance returns to it throughout the film. The interpretation veers sharply away from the tweedy expectations set by Basil Rathbone and others, but it’s as true in its own way to the source. Holmes is a man only fully engaged by life when it offers a direct challenge.