It doesn’t take long, in Guy Ritchie’s new Sherlock Holmes, to see that this is a different version of the master detective than we’re used to. Really just a couple of minutes, which is how long it takes Robert Downey Jr., as Holmes, to start throwing Matrix-style slow-motion punches in brutalizing a bad guy. His sidekick Watson, depicted in the classic 1940s Holmes films as a portly bumbler, is new here too: He looks like Jude Law, and he’s sharp with a pistol.

But then, if you’ve seen the trailers, you knew that already. This Sherlock, the ads have made clear, is not the fusty pipe-chomper with the funny hat. This is a Sherlock Holmes who takes his shirt off and hits people. It’s an interesting idea, this beefcake Holmes, but my big question going in was: Can the movie still work as a detective story?

The answer is, well, only sort of. The plot, such as it is, revolves around a mystical baddie named Lord Blackwood, who Holmes and Watson chase, and catch, and chase again. He likes to kill young women, but, more pressingly, he wants to rule England — and America, too. And, as Holmes is warned, “His power grows daily,” apparently stoked by the forces of black magic, evil, and a secret society warmed over from The Da Vinci Code.

It’s a lot to keep track of, but there is a compelling idea in there: Holmes on the side of reason, the intellectual superhero wielding his heightened perceptive powers against a villain whose strength seems supernatural. The problem is, as promising as this central conflict may be, the filmmakers don’t seem to trust the audience to see it through. So, layered on top, we get the fight scenes, an explosion, and a couple of less-than-riveting romantic subplots.

The movie, in short, feels like it was written by a bunch of different people. Which, of course, it was. And while there is certainly no shame in having multiple contributors to a whole that makes sense, the large-scale, well-constructed action sequences don’t feel especially integrated with the quieter, mental-chess-game sections of the film. The result is a tonally inconsistent mishmash, an agglomeration of expensive, highly polished parts that don’t really blend the way they should.

This is not to say, believe it or not, that I didn’t enjoy it. Last year around this time, out of options and looking to escape a house stuffed with relatives, I actually paid to see the execrable Vince Vaughn – Reese Witherspoon comedy Four Christmases, and I left the theater feeling surly and depressed at the loss of my $10. Whereas this year, I’d feel just fine about recommending Sherlock Holmes to a person looking to escape the holidays for a couple of hours. For a Christmas blockbuster, you could do a lot worse.

The thing is, even though the elements don’t mesh, some of them are a lot of fun. There is wit in the banter between Holmes and Watson, and in the fight scenes, too. The staging of the fights — in a drawn-out sequence between Holmes and a gargantuan Frenchman, and in the bare-chested boxing match we’ve all seen in the trailers — is clever at its best, and even when it verges on cheesy, it does so interestingly.

For example, I wasn’t, personally, a fan of all the slow-motion stopping and starting — it felt like a trick that had been done, better, in a lot of other places. But Ritchie deploys it in service of a cool idea: He’ll pause the action, sometimes, to see Holmes puzzle and reason his way through fast-moving events. In these moments, we see (and hear, in voice-over) the master detective’s mind at work, then watch how physical action follows. It’s a fun concept, even if, in the execution, it tended to remind me of the “math genius” who illustrates his crime-solving in CGI chalkboard sequences on the network cop show Numb3rs.

That is not a good thing to be reminded of, because a movie this expensive should never recall something so cheap. Unfortunately, much of Sherlock Holmes had the same not-so-fresh feeling. As a Simpsons fan from way back, I found myself writing in my notebook, during one hoary secret-society bit, “I am thinking of the Stonecutters.” And as for a climactic sequence, near the end of the second act: If you’ve seen one guy flying away from an explosion, propelled into the air by the blast only to wake up with barely a scratch, you’ve seen them all — and trust me, you have.

Still: An action scene that precedes all that, involving pig carcasses, a giant saw, and a tied-up Rachel McAdams, is genuinely suspenseful and exciting. Downey seems to be enjoying himself throughout the film, delivering arched-eyebrow bon mots like, “Ahhh … putrefaction!” with relish. And the sets and backgrounds are a treat, with Victorian London at its grimiest, the grey sky hanging close to the muddy ground.

I just wish the tone had been more consistent, and that it had all hung together more comfortably, with more forward momentum. Near the end, as Holmes explains how he solved the case, we see flashbacks to various points in the film when he gathered the clues that led to his eventual conclusion. The problem is that the narrative he lays out feels cohesive only in retrospect. The first time through, it feels more like a series of episodic vignettes, sometimes related but just as often not.

That goes to the heart of my last problem with the movie. It might sound crazy to say, but Downey and Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes is just too smart, too capable. He brings order to seemingly random events, he beats up guys twice his size, and he does it all just a tad too easily. The sense of inevitability saps the drama.

It might have been interesting, after seeing his mental calculations lead to his desired outcome once or twice, to watch them go wrong, and then to follow his thought process as he adjusts to unexpected events. But no, Holmes here is less like a chess master, thinking three moves ahead, than like a chess-playing computer. His reasoning is always sound, and his predictions are always right. He isn’t even a drug addict! In fact, by the looks of him shirtless, he somehow finds time to hit the gym several hours a day.

Still, for all of the movie’s flaws, Downey’s Holmes — and the clever byplay between him and Law’s Watson — is appealing enough to leave you wanting more. Near the end, with one villain foiled, McAdams’ love-interest character describes a second, even more shadowy criminal mastermind, one with whom Holmes will no doubt match wits in the sequel.

“He’s just as brilliant as you are,” she tells him, “and infinitely more devious.” To which Holmes retorts: “We’ll see about that.”

I hope so — really. That, actually, is the movie I’d like to see: one in which Downey’s Sherlock Holmes has to stretch a little, maybe even lose a fight here or there. And if, in that movie, the closing credits list one or two fewer screenwriters? Well, so much the better.

Related posts on 30ninjas.com:

• Doug Liman Blog: Sherlock Holmes Premiere — Getting My Dose of Schmoozing, Meeting Robert Downey, and a Fun Movie All in One Night
• Exclusive Interview: Sherlock Holmes Writer on Robert Downey’s Kung Fu and the Delicate Issue of Holmes’ Coke Addiction (Part 3)
• A Moriarty to Sherlock Holmes
• Robert Downey Jr., No!
• New Sherlock Holmes Trailer
• Sherlock Holmes Midnight Screenings Canceled