Downey Jr plays bare-knuckle Sherlock

Poor Sherlock Holmes. The American actor Robert Downey Jnr, who is about to pull on the deerstalker for yet another film about the great fictional detective has been sharing his thoughts on how he and his director, Guy Ritchie, husband of Madonna, plan to play it. And it looks as though Sir Arthur Conan Doyle will be spinning in his grave.

"I love the idea of martial arts and bare-knuckle boxing… before the Queensbury rules, where it was all kind of proper, it was this real balls-to-the-wall, brutal type stuff," Downey Jnr has just explained in an interview in Hollywood.

Guy Ritchie's take on it was that "it's like [we'll be] making a contemporary version of a very classic portrayal of exactly how it was. But it's not telling one of the stories from one of the books or anything like that. Watson…it's all there. The cool thing about Sherlock Holmes was he's actually a very skilled martial artist. So it's going to have elements of that…it's not just his deduction and all that stuff. It's going to be a very action-packed version of that. To me it's really exciting."

Ritchie, who has not had a film hit since in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels in 1998, starts shooting Sherlock Holmes in October for a release next year. If kung fu fighting in Baker Street proves not to be to everyone's liking, there is some good news. Columbia Pictures are planning a rival remake. The bad news is that Holmes is to be played by Sacha Baron Cohen, creator of Ali G and Borat, in a comic version. ·