Guy Richie who is best known for his fast paced, slightly comical and wildly stylish, brain twisting British crime thrillers, Lock Stock and Smoking Barrel and Snatch being his best. I've been a fan of his works and loved his style of film making( I'm conveniently forgetting Swept Away)and been looking forward to a good movie from him. I saw Rock'n'Rolla couple of days back and I think Guy Ritchie is in the right direction for a comeback after the disastrous Swept Away. This made me take a more detailed look at his new adaptation of Sherlock Holmes. I've heard about the project and it struck me as odd that Guy Ritchie will choose such a topic for a movie and was apprehensive about it. What I didn't think of was the possibility that instead of Guy Ritchie conforming to Sherlock Holmes, he might just modify Sherlock Holmes to his style.

I saw an article and a still from the movie in NewYork Times that completely put things in perspective.
I think the picture speaks for itself. Thats Sherlock Holmes we see in the movie with blood on his bare chest and Robert Downey Jr showing off his well chiseled abs. Well for all those who pictured Sherlock Holmes as a quite, passive, think tank Guy Ritchie's version of Sherlock Holmes is gonna give a rude shock. I for one think it is absolute genius using Sherlock Holmes' boxing and sword fencing background to good use. Here is a little excerpt from the article:

IN a filthy, dank labyrinth of rooms below the streets of the East End, Sherlock Holmes was solving a case. That is, Robert Downey Jr., playing Holmes in the forthcoming film “Sherlock Holmes,” was engaged in hand-to-hand, foot-to-stomach combat with a very big and very bad villain (Robert Maillet). Bam! Pow! Ouch! Both characters would end up knocked out on the floor, along with Holmes’s trusty sidekick, Dr. John Watson, played by Jude Law.

Filmed in December, the scene presented a sharp corrective to the popular cinematic view of Holmes, at least the one propagated by the old films featuring the wonderfully named British actor Basil Rathbone. That Holmes occasionally wielded guns, leapt out of carriages and rushed through the fog with Errol Flynnesque panache, but mostly he was a giant brain inside a tweed suit, sexlessly debonair in the way Hollywood liked its leading men in the 1930s and 1940s. His Watson, played by Nigel Bruce, was a lumpy, good-natured, birdbrained foil for Holmes’s brittle brilliance.

The Sherlock Holmes of “Sherlock Holmes,” which is scheduled for release on Nov. 13, will not be wearing a deerstalker hat. Nor will he be wearing an Inverness overcoat, the kind with the dashing cloak that hangs over the shoulders as extra protection against the English rain. Sometimes — as in one fight scene — he will not even be wearing a shirt. (This gives Mr. Downey a chance to show off his admirably chiseled abs.)

Sure, he will still be smarter than everyone within a three-planet radius, and he will retain his uncanny ability to intuit whole life stories from the tiniest speck of dust on a shoe. But he will do those things while being a man of action, a chaser, shooter and pummeler of criminals — “like James Bond in 1891,” Joel Silver, one of the film’s producers, said last fall.

This might me the Sherlock Holmes that the new generation like and love. Just the idea is exciting. A movie in which we can see incredibly amazing deductive abilities of Sherlock and a little bit of action too along the way. Die Hard Sherlock fans will most probably hate this, and those who are already familiar with him will find it difficult to adapt to this new Sherlock, but the new minds-those who are unfamiliar with the concept of Sherlock holmes will most probably love this one. Can't wait for this movie to release.