Will the real Sherlock please stand up?

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1893 short story The Adventure of the Final Problem begins with Sherlock Holmes returning home with “abraded knuckles,” a perfectly British euphemism for scraped near to the bone. It is only page one of the tale and Holmes has already survived and thwarted three murder attempts in a single day. Now, if “abraded knuckles” don’t come to mind when hearing the name now synonymous with deductive reasoning, that’s because Holmes, above perhaps most fictional heroes, has been for decades sanded down and polished unrecognizable by generic euphemisms, misreadings and stale pop-culture references from stage and screen.

Thankfully, the real Sherlock Holmes stands up this month when Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes opens Christmas Day.

The official Web site for the film leads boldly with its “Loading intro” letterpress text placed over what appears to be a small mound of cocaine, a vice no doubt set to appear in the new film just as it did repeatedly in Doyle’s original stories. This isn’t your grandfather’s Holmes. It is actually your great-great grandfather’s. This is the original gangster.

And who better to take Holmes back to his daredevil roots than Ritchie, the director who made whiz-bang British gangster movies cool again with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, and most recently, the underrated RocknRolla? Ritchie’s bold new film, which stars Robert Downey Jr., is not a re-imagining of the Sherlock Holmes persona. It is a reclamation.

Downey has managed to stay clean long enough to finally establish himself as a bankable, if unpredictable, leading man. Downey’s summation of the character? “Holmes is such a weirdo,” he told the BBC while researching the role.

With The Final Problem, Doyle himself killed off Holmes in order to focus on his more serious literature—though he later caved to fan pressure and brought the lucrative sleuth back from the dead. Point being, for all of Holmes’ heady, IQ-wielding intellect and witty one-upmanship, Doyle designed him for pulp fiction and nothing more. So it is a shame that the old movies were pretty much a bore.

The “new” Holmes is, correctly, a former boxer who isn’t afraid to use his cane for more than walking. He still puffs away at his pipe, though gone is the now traditional deerstalker. Doyle never described Holmes as having such a hat that traditionally was worn while hunting in rural areas. Most of Holmes’ hunting takes place in London, so Downey’s rumpled fedora makes more sense even if it is better suited for bohemian artist Toulouse-Lautrec than a prim and proper Englishman.

Action sequences abound, and this time Holmes’ near-supernatural detective skills are put to the test against what could be a bona fide supernatural foe. Lord Blackwood is a cult leader bent on destroying England and is rumored to have come back from the dead. This wouldn’t be a 2009 movie without a vampire or zombie, now would it? So, how do Ritchie and Downey circumvent audience expectations and still deliver a modern adaptation that is true to Doyle’s pulpy vision? Let’s hope elegantly, my dear Watson. Sherlock Holmes co-stars Jude Law and Rachel McAdams and opens wide Dec. 25.

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