Russell Crowe onboard for Guy Ritchie’s kick-butt Sherlock Holmes film

Guy Ritchie’s new Sherlock Holmes film might be benefiting from some high powered casting. Supposedly Russell Crowe will be accompanying Holmes as sidekick Dr Watson. The Gladiators star would be playing opposite Robert Downey Jr as the legendary fictional sleuth’s confidante and storyteller in the forthcoming flick.
A source tells the UK Sun, “Russell wants the part, Guy wants Russell. All they’ve got left to do is dot the i’s and cross the t’s.”

This will not be your mom and dad’s Basil Rathbone – Sherlock Holmes’ though, with the legendary crimefighter using his pipe-puffing, laidback approach to solving mysteries in the series of movies. In Guy Ritchie’s vision for the remake, Holmes will be turned into a “bad-ass” martial arts expert. I am pretty sure there is or recently was a TV cartoon version of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle classic that did the same.
Robert Downey Jr tells The UK Sun, “I’ve got to spend some time with Guy and I love his take on it. We’re both martial arts enthusiasts and in the original stories of Sherlock Holmes, he’s kind of a bad-ass and a bare-knuckle boxer and studies the rare, fictional martial art of baritsu.
“If you look baritsu up, they can’t even really tell you what it is, so it gives us a lot of leeway.” And the Chaplin star insists the Holmes mysteries are still relevant to today’s audiences, adding: “It’s a period piece where you don’t modernise it, you just realise how modern it was.”