We Saw Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes Yesterday.

I loved it. I understand that the movie is incurring a little bit of opposition from the hard-core Irregulars, but look at it this way: a lot less violence was done to the Sherlock Holmes legacy by this movie than was done to the story of the H.M.S. Titanic by James Cameron’s effects-driven effort some years back. (Though I’ll never argue with the ship’s sinking: that was freakin’ awesome. That’s a movie to fast-forward through: a sinking to remember.)

But, as with the bones thrown to Titanic buffs in The Titanic, there are a few tips of the hat in Sherlock Holmes to the Doyle priesthood, including the suggestion that Watson might be a bit of a gambler, and the elevation of the bulldog to the status of third roommate and Sherlockian lab rat.

But there’s something in it for everyone, so the Irregulars’ protests will fall upon deaf ears. This movie will long be enjoyed by steam-punkers, mystery fans, Victorian historians, and martial artists alike. Not to mention those who don’t mind looking at Robert Downey, Jr., Jude Law, Mary Reilly, and the delicious Rachel McAdams. I believe that even the Ripperologists may get a thrill out of seeing the gritty side of London reproduced. (And how I ache to visit that city now. As soon as we get rich again, we must put together a trip to England and Ireland. I regard images of London the way one might look at pictures of an internet lover one has been e-flirting with, quite suggestively, for years: I must see it. I must know, one way or the other, before I die.)

It isn’t a film for purists. It isn’t the Harry Potter series, or The Lord of the Rings. But there is plenty there for casual fans of the books and stories: for one thing, this Sherlock brings out, as no other version I’ve seen has, the action-oriented side of the series. The Sherlock Holmes of Doyle’s imagination didn’t only live the life of the mind: he was a Renaissance man. He was physical. He was a sort of superman, of the type that is difficult to write because he has few flaws on the surface. The writers of this version gave him emotional, biochemical and moral failings, to compensate and make him realistic. Guy Ritchie and his team played up the Bohemian side of Holmes, and made him a jealous, possessive, hard-drinking, insensitive, petty, vindictive man. Which, of course, is exactly what Holmes would have been, had he ever actually existed.

Perfect.

My minimum requirement was met, and I’d have to give a bit too much away to say what that was. I’ll only remind people that when it comes to mysteries I’m a strict “fair play” Sayersian: I want all the clues out in the open. That cannot be done as elegantly in a movie as it can on the page, because to explain every clue adequately, while providing enough red herrings to camouflage the real clues, requires the written word: in a movie, it would simply be too talky. A movie or television mystery will rarely, if ever, deliver the same cerebral satisfaction that a written one will, even in short-story form.

And, of course, the movie suffers from a slight case of compulsive fast-cut disease, as many films from the past 20 years do; thank you, MTV. I found it forgiveable in light of the mission, which was obviously to bring out the action-oriented side of the Holmes legacy. My husband found it wearying: “there is nothing wrong with the occasional long shot. They’ve been used for decades for very good reason.” He is correct, but I’ve seen much, much worse cases of that affliction.

Then we squabbled a bit, good-naturedly, about the degree to which the original Holmes was a man of action [I was right; he was] and whether the line about Alice in Wonderland might have been an anachronism, if that first Alice book hadn’t yet filtered into the popular imagination by 1891, the year the film is set in [he was right; the Lewis Carroll books caught fire much more quickly than I’d remembered, and they were very much a part of pop culture by 1891].

“So now you’re going to go blog about this, aren’t you?” he remarked.

“You’re damned skippy I am,” I told him.

Now try this:

[Note: I know the publicity photos are screwed up, here: the official SH website won’t let me pull the images at all, using the Macintosh drag-over method. IMDB will only let me drag the thumbnails; if I attempt to drag them to my hard drive, the system clicks me to the next image. Maddening.

Presumably, I’ll figure something out later on, unless I don’t.]