text: (CNN) -- According to the "Guinness Book of World Records," Sherlock Holmes is the most popular role in the movies. 
  
  So if Robert Downey Jr. hardly seems like the iconic Sherlock (he's too short and muscular, and strains to suggest the intellectual arrogance that comes so easily to the English), he can take his place alongside such oddball castings as Buster Keaton, Charlton Heston and George C. Scott. And he's ideally suited to director Guy Ritchie's purpose, which is not to dust off your grandfather's Conan Doyle, but to juice today's kids with a quirky 19th century super sleuth. 
  
  What's fun about these movies is that the equation works both ways. 
  
  Yes, this Holmes is more likely to get physical than his predecessors, he's even a bit of a boor, but he's still a more cerebral action hero than we find in most blockbusters, and the period trappings (a seamless blend of CGI and location work) help this franchise stand out from the crowd of comic book adaptations. 
  
  Ritchie and husband-and-wife screenwriters Kieran and Michele Mulroney ("Paper Man") map out a fast-moving -- if ridiculously digressive -- Victorian adventure that crisscrosses Europe by horseless carriage, train, boat, and, in Sherlock's case, pony. 
  
  Just down the road from 221 Baker Street they're digging a tunnel for what will become the London Underground. The Industrial Age is beginning to stretch its muscles, while a series of terrorist atrocities are gnawing at the fragile understanding between the great European powers. Holmes detects something other than social unrest behind the bombings: an evil master plan leading inexorably to his nemesis, Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris). 