Survey of Critics' and Scholars' Writings on the Movie

Below are two great sources written on Sherlock Holmes 2009. 
"The opening scenes of Sherlock Holmes (2009) immediately show Guy Ritchie´s signature
and the fact that this film will offer a new take on the detective´s adventures. Holmes and Watson
fight their way through several henchmen and save a woman from a seance-like ritual performed by
villain Lord Blackwood. Holmes' intellect, too, is immediately depicted, but he uses his brain not so
much for deductions based on a clue as for a physicality different from Rathbone's and Brett's:
before he corners a guard, a slow-motion sequence shows how he plans to attack the man and what
he predicts the reactions will be. The amount of frames per second then returns to the regular
number, and Holmes is proven right, disabling the man in a second with martial arts. In the film's
commentary track, Ritchie describes this ability as “Holmes-o-vision”. Watson may not have
Holmes-o-vision, but his fighting skills are proven to be adequate in the scene that follows (and, in
the rest of the film). This Holmes and Watson are presented like action heroes and are nothing like
any previous depictions of the duo – so how are these the true Conan Doyle-characters?"

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"It is because of Downey Jr's place in the modern superhero canon that he was cast, so successfully, as Sherlock Holmes. One of the most common negative responses that I encountered in regard to Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes (2009) has been that the detective should not be muscular and built with a six-pack. But in the current cultural climate where narratives from the past are becoming updated, taking on meanings and identities that have traversed time and settling in a new generation, his six-pack is particularly apt. Sherlock Holmes is a superhero. He is, remarkably, and like Superman, equal to the rigors of the industrial age of his time: he fights side-by-side with the Industrial Revolution, escaping death at the hands of a ship-in-production, and at the great heights of an under-construction bridge. Bukatman writes that "superhero bodies, despite their plasticity, are armoured bodies, rigid against the chaos of surrounding disorder" (Bukatman, 56). This is where the strength of Holmes’ six-pack lies; whereas in Iron Man it is Downey Jr’s suit that is excessively fetishized, in Sherlock Holmes, it is above all his body. He is defined by his a body from the opening scene of the film, where his muscles are on display and even spectacularized in slow motion as a signifier of his strength. Susan Bordo provides a perfect assessment: “[M]uscles have chiefly symbolized and continue to symbolize masculine power as physical strength” (Bordo, 193). Without this display of muscularity it is unclear whether Sherlock would be quite as strong; Watson, after all, is only the sidekick, and there is a reason he never takes off his shirt."

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