The reboot moment in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes comes when Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) within seconds makes an on-the-hoof analytical plan of how he will incapacitate the opponent standing before him and then proceeds to do so, delivered on-screen via some slick slow motion and close-up flicker-frame editing. The central premise of this reinvention of Sherlock Holmes is Holmes as subversive action hero –Russell Brand meets Russell Crowe if you will. The combat trick is employed again later on when the misanthropic, hugely talented and seemingly masochistically self-destructive Holmes (a part Downey Jr. can Blackberry in blindfold from personal memory and experience) partakes in a bout of illegal fisticuffs with a physical bruiser of an adversary. You are expecting Sherlock to come a cropper second time round, otherwise, what’s the point? That he doesn’t, spectacularly flooring the brute in question after taking a Fight Club-worthy beating himself, isn’t a cunning directorial surprise on Ritchie’s part but a trademark triumph of show over substance. Some off-screen Cockney wide boy (there are a lot of ‘em about in Ritchie’s London) exclaims indignantly: “Where’d that come from?” The ready answer is no surprise: it comes from Hollywood, me ol’ cocker. It comes from a world in which the integrity and inventiveness of any tale takes second place to (hopefully) managing the right mix of ingredients in order to (hopefully) get as many buttocks as possible stuck on auditorium seats. After all, an awful lot of people have invested an awful lot of their awfully hard-earned money into it and they are entitled to a significant return. Hollywood eats everything and regurgitates it in the hope of mass consumption. Including the British Indie take-away.

Along with staples of British stage and screen (Geraldine James, James Fox, Eddie Marsan) its ingredients include a little bit of Ocean’s Eleven in the would-be suave caper interplay between a youthful Holmes and Watson (Jude Law); a little bit of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in their partial purpose as walking wardrobes and in the irreverent aplomb with which they face extreme danger. A little bit of what, God help us, Barry Sonnenfeld’s Wild Wild West could have been, and also the alarming feeling that Guy Ritchie, or someone centrally involved, believes that The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a great film, since there are moments in Sherlock Holmes uncannily like it. Not least of all in the look of late Victorian London (it has to be said that Sarah Greenwood’s production design is the main star of this film) and in the special effects, in which buildings and objects at times take on an impossible vastness.

The plot (keyed in by a trio of writers) involves the evil occultist Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), intent on conquest of the world, a dastardly deed realised by fanning out his influence from the seat of British Parliament (some sort of pertinent critique here of the evils of Empire perhaps, a salient right-on reminder in our current age of ill-advised hubristic foreign intervention). Strong has stated that his portrayal of Blackwood was partly modelled on Aleister Crowley, but with the film’s behind-closed-doors secret societies cum political coteries of old codgers and young Hooray Henrys (sorry: ‘Enerys) Oswald Mosley meets The Bullingdon Boys would be closer to the mark. For all his sotto voce sibilant suggestiveness and Lecter-like ability to subdue the susceptible unto death, we know Strong’s Aleister Mosley will eventually be presented with The Great Unknown. And just who is the mysterious figure lurking throughout the internecine goings on of 1890s Steampunk Victoriana, pulling strings, slipping betwixt the shadows? It couldn’t possibly be him could it? All is almost revealed. An ‘M’ for Holmesian mysterious eventually gets spelled out for us.

Meanwhile, Holmes is the kick-ass Dawkins of his day, outing the would-be existence of the supernatural using the powers of his unsentimental deductive reasoning and passionately, fundamentally factual scientific belief system, ridiculing all the fairies in the garden with cold hard thought. One of the cathartic moments of the film is its Cottingley-like debunking when Holmes’s deductive and observational science explicates gullible superstition for what it is, don’t you see? Not wishing to alienate believers among the audience perhaps, the raven that keeps cropping up at fittingly symbolic moments hints at other things entirely. (Somewhere, the spiritualist seeker Sir Arthur Conan D. is probably not smiling.) The ménage à trois sub-plot involving Holmes, his bachelor but soon to be married buddy Watson (lest we forget, also a former war hero, handy in a punch-up) and Irene Adler (a Stateside Mata Hari in stays, played in good spirit by Rachel McAdams) is more diverting and entertaining than the main plot itself. Thankfully, the one is soon entwined with the other and just about keeps the whole alive. Adams is suitably suggestive and sexy, a sort of suffrage bound proto-Bourne femi-babe strutting her liberated stuff in the mean streets of 1890s London. While part of the success of Jude Law’s performance is that you do forget at moments that it is actually him; that prop shop moustache helps – a lot. Remarkably, the Bromance dimension between Holmes and Watson is kept more or less in check, only lips are stiff and upper here, but what we do get is essentially touchy feely metrosexual love for the end of the Noughties. Thirty years previously director Billy Wilder and reclusive thespian Robert Stephens gave us characters of adult depth and substance about whom we are actually given the time to care in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.

The Boxing Day release of Guy Ritchie’s take on Sherlock Holmes clearly markets it as seasonal fun fare, so why so Bah Humbug! about it? It is quite the romp; it looks great; it’s got Robert Downey Jr. in it, in full, brilliantly dishevelled intellectual mode, and it contains an on-form Hans Zimmer zither-strewn score. Why so grumpy then? Because there came a point at which it reminded me of the new Star Trek trampling the multiplexes in its Emperor’s new reboot earlier this year and of my recent (defiantly 2D) experience of Avatar in which I suddenly remembered I once had a brain and realised I was being taken – again – for a fool. Make of me a child again in the cinema, by all means, but not a fool. These films do not advance or display innovative additions to cinematic storytelling; instead they footle about with Hollywood storytelling, something very different. They take elements of past greatness, cheapen them by simplification posing as universal appeal (whereby it becomes abhorrent snobbery to question it as such, a curmudgeonly disservice to entertainment for one and all) delivered via shiny surface but vastly expensive sheen, the underbelly being self-congratulatory Hollywood in-jokes masquerading as clever variations on a given classic story or genre trope. Hollywood ingests originality and regurgitates it for mass consumption just like it does everything else. I’ve little doubt Guy Ritchie can’t actually tell the difference and I am becoming more convinced that the director of Terminator and Aliens no longer can, either. This coming from a reviewer who actually enjoyed X-Men Origins: Wolverine might seem a bit rich. But enough is enough. In Guards! Guards! Terry Pratchett wrote: “The reason that clichés become clichés is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication”. We live in an age in which computerised hammers and screwdrivers are utilised from the CGI toolbox of communication. And yet it is foolish to believe that we are getting anything other than a more precisely rendered cliché as the manufactured end product. Only these are not even variations on universal story clichés anymore, they’re Hollywood clichés, dependent purely on the world of American films and franchises. As Warner Bros will tell you: That’s entertainment, folks! Nowadays it is. In this respect we’ve never had it so good. Get those rose-tinted plastic glasses ready (the ones that add a few quid to your cinema ticket) and roll on Sherlock Meets Moriarty in 3D, I say. Cor blimey, guv’! I’m gettin’ a feelin’ a bit like butterflies in me belly already.