People need to go back and re-read the Sherlock Holmes stories.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote 60 Holmes tales, published between 1887 and 1927 — and they are readily available. But, because remedial reading classes are not mandatory for movie commentators, I guess we will have to put up with the fact that most reviewers will assume that the new Guy Ritchie movie is a “violation” of the sanctified character of the Holmes canon, which they really only know through previous movies. Ritchie may violate some things, but it isn’t the character of Sherlock Holmes.

Mainly, reviewers have complained that Ritchie and his three credited screenwriters have turned Holmes into an action figure. But a return to A Study in Scarlet, the first of the Holmes tales, and also certain later stories, including His Last Bow, shows Holmes to be a man versed in everything, from the constituent parts of cigar ash to the fencing sword. He was observed by his roommate, Dr. Watson, to be something of a perfect man, or an ubermencsh, deficient in only one area, that of social relations and romantic entanglements, which is where The Woman, Irene Adler, comes in, by way of a later story, and is now incorporated into Ritchie’s narrative. It was only in later adaptations that Holmes was adduced to be all brain, with acute observational powers, and descendents and mimics of the Holmes idea, such as Nero Wolfe and Philo Vance, carried forth that idea, consequently tainting the general view of Holmes.

Each generation gets the Holmes that defines it. Early plays based on the character preferred the sitting and listening Holmes, possibly because of the limitations of contemporary theater staging. In the 1940s, Holmes was enlisted to help the war effort on screen, and there he was the fearless patriotic master of disguise and a social chameleon, able to talk to streetwalkers and lords with equal command. The Peter Cushing Holmes of the Hammer studio Hound of the Baskervilles was also brave and active. The fabled Jeremy Brett series for British television offered a hardnosed and eccentric Holmes, more brain than brawn in a time of economic and political uncertainty and upheaval, especially in Europe. Now in the context of international wars and endless Hollywood action movies, we have Holmes as man of the fist and pistol, with a secondary line in ratiocination.

Sherlock Holmes is a very enjoyable action movie, though, it is arguably not as finely tuned or as funny as it could be. On the other hand, Robert Downey, Jr., one of the best screen actors, has wonderful chemistry with Jude Law, as an equally vigorous Watson, recreated here with the historical limp from wounds suffered in an earlier war in Afghanistan that Doyle ascribed to him.

But you could also argue that Downey’s Holmes is still a brainiac even in the midst of his fight scenes (and there are a lot of them). He mentally rehearses two violent encounters. Reviewers have laughed at these sequences, probably because they are so like the “Ritchie” of Snatch and other movies, but in reality they cleverly show the admirable melding of Holmes’s mind as a thinker and doer.

The tone of Sherlock Holmes is more Alan Moore and Young Sherlock Holmes, with a little Da Vinci Code thrown in, than the steampunk genre that critics have relished linking it to. The movie doesn’t offer the London of movie noir, with its fog and crooked streets and Dickensian cast of characters likely to emerge out of shadowy doorframes. Instead, it is a city under construction, which gives it the appearance of a city undergoing destruction, a dirty, degraded place that seems unworthy of the struggle that certain social elites engage in to control it.

Where Ritchie and his collaborators go awry is in the same area where all previous adaptors have been misled. It is important to remember that the main character of Doyle’s stories is really Watson, and that he is in reality observing Holmes from outside, presenting the detective as an admirable, but difficult, eccentric.

The pace of Sherlock Holmes isn’t as crisp as other Ritchie movies. And I think that the messy digs at 221 B Baker Street come across more like the set of Saw than the working office of a ravenous intellectual. His apartment is dingy and brown, and it’s not that much different from the secret laboratory of a mad scientist that Holmes unearths later in the story.

The Holmes’ residence in movies, such as Billy Wilder’s masterpiece The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, still loom as the way to show the detective’s fortress of solitude, and sometimes the plot is hard to follow — but I attribute that to the noisiness and overproduced soundtracks of modern movies (and the absence of the subtitles which I almost always turn on when watching DVDs).

Probably the most significant aspect of Sherlock Holmes is the value it places on intelligence in the face of corruptly used mysticism. At first the movie looks as if it is going in the direction of Young Sherlock Holmes, which pits the hero against imported witch doctors, probably under the influence of the Raiders of the Lost Ark movies. Then it seems to tilt toward the kind of conspiracy found in a Dan Brown novel and the movies derived from them. How can the Holmes of this movie combat supernatural powers? Fortunately, in the end, the movie heralds intelligence over the supernatural, and this alone makes Sherlock Holmes a unique and uniquely entertaining action movie.

D.K. Holm is The Voice’s cinema critic and author of several recent and forthcoming books, including Film Soleil.