When Guy Ritchie first announced that his new Sherlock Holmes movie would portray the great detective as a “street-fighting man,” my first reaction was this: “Uh-oh.” The good Carter tells me I react that way far too much, and she may be right. Another tid-bit about Ritchie’s movie came to me this week, and I’m having a change of heart.

In an interview with Robert Downey, Jr., the star of Guy Ritchie’s movie, Downey said this about Ritchie, himself, and Holmes: “We’re both martial arts enthusiasts and in the original stories of Sherlock Holmes, he’s kind of a bad-ass and a bare-knuckle boxer and studies the rare, fictional martial art of baritsu.” Suddenly it all became clear: Ritchie and Downey do understand Sherlock Holmes . . . at least as much as Nicholas Meyer did.

Remember Nicholas Meyer, the guy who started a new Holmes boom in the 1970s by playing up his cocaine habit beyond its Canonical role? Not the most popular guy among Sherlockians, but now we love him. So now Guy Ritchie is playing up Sherlock Holmes’s violent side, and like the cocaine, he’s actually using what’s in the stories.

Sherlock Holmes was a bare-knuckle boxer. He was good enough to fight three rounds with a prize fighter named McMurdo and trounce a local bully named Roaring Jack Woodley, sending him “home in a cart.” Sherlock Holmes also knew baritsu, a mythic martial art that defeated a vengeful Moriarty. He boxed in college, fenced, practiced single-stick, and was handy with firearms.

And while all of these things could hardly see any use in a case like Mary Sutherland’s lost boyfriend or mere social matters like yellow-faced neighbors or sibling rivalries between a step-brother and a baby, the skills were always there, always in the background at the ready. We actually probably see less of them because Holmes left Watson out of the really dangerous cases just to protect his wound-handicapped friend.

Robert Downey, Jr. is right. Sherlock Holmes is kind of a bad-ass. I always wanted to see him turn those famous observation-deduction skills he used to impress his clients on a Moriarty hireling or other low-life. Imagine Sherlock Holmes throwing out impossible-to-know details about a thug’s personal life during a rough interrogation, using each sign of weakness as his next spot to twist the verbal knife. We saw how Holmes could upset Watson in casual conversation accidentally with comments about his brother the drunk derived from a pocket watch. What if Holmes actually wanted to make someone squirm?

That cold, scientific way of his that had Stamford a bit scared in A Study in Scarlet gave him an edge on villains that rivals anything Batman could turn on with his dark Halloween costume. Back that up with his lean physical prowess, and you’ve got a guy who can pull off anything Jason Statham or Nicholas Cage might do in their movies (except, of course, for those things that physics don’t really allow, but hey, Holmes is in a movie, too, in this case, so why now?).

True, there is the potential for over-kill, hokum, and sheer disaster in any motion picture project. Like any other movie, this could turn into an embarassing disaster. But, like a certain political candidate who’s pushing hope these day, I don’t think that hoping for the best is a bad thing at all.

A movie about Sherlock Holmes kicking ass could really kick ass . . . for Holmes, for that classic 16 to 25 male demographic of movie-goers, and for the Sherlockian world as well.

Your humble correspondent,
Brad Keefauver