To be sure, the Holmesian paradigm of "deducing" is given its game time, and its pleasures — which have propped up hundreds of movies since 1905 — remain, this time digitally jazzed up as forecasts of Holmes's martial-art strategies. But the take-away is not a matter of zooming set pieces but of character. The new concept of Holmes (credited to four screenwriters) is endlessly amusing: a nervous, brilliant, almost sociopathic trouble maker with whom the orthodox Watson has too much fun to abandon. And the action-movie reflexes are finally little more than loud diversions from the ironic and self-knowing tale beneath the tale, a story of two men in love, the cluttered apartment they share, and the ways in which they keep rescuing and then bickering with each other as they try to stay boys forever.
