Walking out of Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows, I had a ridiculous idea: Can we just let Guy Ritchie direct all of our blockbusters? Here’s a man who understands the medium, and I’m not just talking about how his over-directed, cinematic indulgences crank up the roller coaster ride to eleven. Ritchie gets to the heart of those primary rumblings that vibrate through all good action-adventure extravaganzas, those earth-pounding basses that power movies that feel like sex. And he matches the virility of violence with a foppish wit, a self-deprecating, homoerotic smirk that only a British filmmaker can flash just right.

Yes, I know. If Ritchie directed all of our blockbusters, we would get sick of all the anxious, flickering jumpy-cut fight scenes. We’d bore of the visual cleavage he makes of slow motion sequences shot at a billion frames-per-second. We’d tire of his meticulous (anal?) deconstruction of the tiniest of action actions, those scientific montages of bullets careening through gun chambers, pistol hammers snapping onto power, and fingers slipping into brass knuckles. Yes, yes, yes, it would all be too much. But when you only get one Guy Ritchie film every few years, like that mistress you’re hiding in that château outside ofParis, you just wish you could make the trip more often.

The appeal of Ritchie’s movies, from the moment Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels freeze-framed its characters into our collective memories, is bound up in how they make us feel like we’re in the inner circle of nasty cool kids we wouldn’t talk to on the school playground. I think of Ritchie as the Placebo of movie makers, but maybe that’s because I discovered both the band and the director at the same time. Nevertheless, there is a similarity in how both Richie’s movies and Placebo’s music make grimy, street-level decadence seem utterly charming and appealing.

Sherlock Holmes, then, that snooty Victorian with the silly pipe, seems like an odd choice of subjects for Ritchie, until your remember that Ritchie takes pop cultural data and submerges it in his own stylish depravity. He’s the Madonna bra of movie makers, and I don’t say that just because he married the pop singer. I think their mutual sexual showmanship fueled the romantic chemistry.

In Richie’s mind, Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) is still a detective, albeit one of the daft, chain-smoking, drug dabbling, philandering sort. His trusty sidekick, Dr. Watson (Jude Law), is less a bowler-wearing stick-in-the-mud, and more, well, us. He likes a bit of excitement, but tries to stay responsible. In Game of Shadows, Watson gets married, but Holmes knows he still has a some adventure in him. That’s why he throws Watson’s newlywed from a train, saves his friend from gun-wielding thugs, and whisks him away in what is simply the most visually and sexually thrilling buddy movie moment ever to keep its pants on. Whatever you say, Mr. Holmes, we’re here for the ride.

The ride takes Holmes and Watson on some complicated mystery that pits an arms dealer versus world peace, and it takes some of Holmes’ skittish astuteness to sort it all out. Put the plot down on paper, and it doesn’t sound very special. So I won’t. What shines here is Ritchie’s wit and style, a kind of bombastic Tarentino-ism that filters the world through the visual imagination of a graphic novel. Ritchie’s style is particularly suited to a reimagining of Holmes because the director has always been something of a filmmaking criminologist. His first short was called “The Hard Case,” and since then, all of his films have been obsessed with the accoutrement of crime.

There is a weltanschauung here, a Darwinian reductionism that sees human action as a series of impulse reactions, competing desires clashing over the problem of material scarcity. These themes are less pronounced in the Holmes films than in Ritchie’s other work, but the bare bones brutalism still rears its face. Holmes is cleaver as a fox, which makes him a kind of detective superman. He is always a dozen steps ahead of his opponents, and Ritchie wraps us in by walking us through each step in literal fashion: sabotages, fist fights, and booby traps. It’s one extreme close up after another, and yet, Ritchie rarely focuses on faces, but rather the guns and the gear. As a result, the guns and the gear are what we fall in love with. And why the hell not? After all, it’s a material world.