directed by Harry Bradbeer
written by Jack Thorn (from the book by Mary Springer)
Like most people around the world, I have seen my former pastime of physically going to watch movies at the mall grind to a halt as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
I've never been the biggest fan of Netflix, but lately, since my wife upgraded our subscription I've been binge-watching quite a few of their original animated series with my two younger children like The Dragon Prince, the new Transformers series and most recently, the mammoth Voltron: Legendary Defender.
As a result, I naturally saw ads for Enola Holmes and decided to check it out.
Enola Holmes is the story of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes' previously unknown sister Enola, played by Stranger Things' breakout star Millie Bobbie Brown. Raised in a somewhat unorthodox way by her progressive mother Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter) who teaches her a variety of skills, including martial arts, Enola is a real firecracker, albeit one content to live on her mother's estate until, one day, she wakes up to find her gone. When her brothers, namely government official Mycroft (Sam Claflin) and renowned detective Sherlock (Henry Cavill) offer Enola no help in finding Eudoria, with Mycroft even planning to send Enola off to finishing school, she sneaks off and sets out to find her mother on her own. While on a train, she encounters the Viscount Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge), a young noble on the run from his family, who, as Enola discovers, has a somewhat deadly pursuer (Burn Gorman) and a somewhat complicated story, which could actually determine the future of England itself. As she searches for her mother, she comes to realize that there is far more to the Tewkesbury affair that a boy running away from home.
I can appreciate fan fiction of popular characters, provided it's done well, and while it's far from a perfect film, Enola Holmes is an enjoyable enough bit of fanfic, in no small part due to Millie Bobbie Brown's charismatic performance which is punctuated by her frequent fourth-wall breaking. It's considerably lighter in tone than any of the recent Sherlock Holmes adaptations (we shall not speak of the Will Ferrel/John C. Reilly clusterf**k) with the exception of some brief action violence, and if I'm honest, I feel it really achieves a lot of what it sets out to achieve.
As a period film, it's got a decent helping of production value, with the Victorian (or is it Edwardian) era well captured in the cinematography, art direction and costume design.
As a whodunit, well, it could just be my age showing but the writers kind of telegraphed their secret long before the climactic revelation of who the real baddie was.
Perhaps the most awkward thing about the movie, though, was how both Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes were reduced to little better than bumbling idiots. Basically, the writers resorted to the tired old trope of making the female character look good by, well emasculating the males. Henry Cavill, the third superhero actor to play the world famous detective after Robert Downey, Jr. and Benedict Cumberbatch, has the distinction of (arguably) looking the most dapper in his period clothes but even though he's miles more sympathetic than the openly misogynistic caricature that is Mycroft, in the end he's quite emphatically second fiddle to the title character. It's good for a laugh, I suppose, but it still felt like lazy writing, and this movie did deserve better, considering there was quite a bit of decent dialogue here and there.
Still engaging peformances from Brown and Partridge more than make up for this film's shortcomings. There's just the right the right amount of thrills and derring-do for an adaptation from a young adult book. There's a bit of romantic tension between Enola and the young Viscount but fortunately the filmmakers handle it quite tastefully, and ultimately, it had something meaningful to say about the state of society without banging the "woke" drum too loudly, and certainly not at the expense of an overall entertaining story.
Given what I imagine was a relatively small budget, a high viewer count per Netflix's reporting and Brown's popularity I imagine we'll be seeing another of these at some point in the future, and if I'm honest I wouldn't mind at all.
7.5/10
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