Sherlock Holmes

Producer Lionel Wigram wanted a Holmes unlike the old films: bohemian, closer to an artist or a poet, and inspired by Toulouse-Lautrec. Guy Ritchie, who heard the stories over a dormitory loudspeaker as a boy, wanted to put on screen the fights Doyle only mentions. Downey picked the hat himself: a beat-up fedora instead of the deerstalker.

In 1890 Holmes stops a ritual by Lord Blackwood, who is hanged and then seems to return from the dead. Holmes won't accept magic: he looks for the science behind every trick. He also has to deal with Irene Adler, the woman who once fooled him, and with Watson moving out of 221B.

By the end of the first film, Holmes sees that Blackwood and Adler were a distraction from a bigger plan. In the second, set in 1891, he deduces the bomb is at the opera and is just wrong, because Moriarty is always a step ahead. Irene Adler has already been killed by the professor. Holmes starts chasing him across Europe, with Watson and the Romani fortune-teller Simza.

The final duel is a game of chess played in their heads while the two fight. Holmes knows he can only stop Moriarty by going down with him, and the scene ends at the Reichenbach Falls, as in "The Final Problem".

Holmes was born in Arthur Conan Doyle's books, in A Study in Scarlet (1887). In print he already boxes and fences, but he is more restrained than Downey's. The duel with Moriarty comes from "The Final Problem", a story from 1893.