Holmes vs. Holmes: Will Robert Downey Jr. or Sacha Baron Cohen Make a Better Sherlock?

It’s the Battle of Baker Street! Robert Downey Jr. and Sacha Baron Cohen will face off as rival Sherlock Holmeses in upcoming films: Cohen is lined up for a Judd Apatow comedy, with Will Ferrell as Watson (More-Funny Sherlock Holmes); Downey is in discussions to appear in the Guy Ritchie comic-book adaptation (Less-Funny Sherlock Holmes).

It’s the Battle of Baker Street! Robert Downey Jr. and Sacha Baron Cohen will face off as rival Sherlock Holmeses in upcoming films: Cohen is lined up for a Judd Apatow comedy, with Will Ferrell as Watson (More-Funny Sherlock Holmes); Downey is in discussions to appear in the Guy Ritchie comic-book adaptation (Less-Funny Sherlock Holmes).

Downey is going to be the one in the deerstalker; Cohen is going to be the one in the tweed thong. Downey will surely explore Holmes’s cocaine addiction; ten bucks says Cohen and Ferrell make out. Downey is probably the coolest movie star in America right now; Cohen is still duping the riffraff into behaving exactly the way everyone watched them behave in Borat. And while we’d ordinarily pick Judd Apatow over Guy Ritchie any day of the week, we have a hunch that Apatow might be getting a little complacent in his success, while at this point Ritchie must be good and mad, right?

Cohen and Apatow certainly might make a serviceable Holmes project, in which Holmes will sniff the butt of the dog that didn’t bark, and maybe Verne Troyer will play Moriarty (the Napoleon of Crime, get it?), and maybe “elementary” will be the punch line to some joke about schoolgirls. But unless Downey manages to melt down before his project gets made (what are the odds?), we’ll take our missing jewelry and mysteriously dead relatives to him, thank you very much. —Linda Holmes