Enola Holmes

Before watching Enola Holmes, I thought it would be about a mediocre mystery that Enola solves. After all, original movie mysteries tend to not be that great. But I can admit when I'm wrong.

Enola ended up not solving the mystery at all.

Before proceeding, I have to admit I feel kind of bad giving this review. Enola Holmes is very clearly intended to be a kid's adventure movie, and so evaluating it as a traditional detective story almost seems unfair. Almost. Even if you just want a light-hearted romp, if you're going to make a movie about Sherlock Holmes' sister and stuff it with female empowerment, you should still have a mystery that the heroine resolves through her own efforts and intellect.

Anyway, as I already implied, Enola is the younger sister of the much more famous Sherlock and Mycroft. Her father died when she was young and her brothers had already gone out into the world by that point, so Enola was raised by her mother—a fierce and vibrant woman who instilled both a love of knowledge and spirit of athleticism within her daughter. When Enola wakes on the morning of her sixteenth birthday, however, her mother is missing. She calls her brothers home, whereupon Mycroft takes charge of Enola and decides to send her to a finishing school to turn her into a proper lady. Being forced to conform to society's standards of femininity in order to become and spend the rest of her life as a pliant housewife is literally the last thing Enola wants to do, so she runs away to escape her brothers and find her mother.

She promptly runs into a young viscount who has also run away from home. After a quick adventure escaping from an assassin, Enola and the young viscount part ways in London. But after a brief attempt at looking for her mother, Enola takes it upon herself to protect the viscount and find out who is trying to have him killed.

Unfortunately, we never encounter anything that could reasonably called a "clue" or a "deduction." The rest of the movie consists of one character either randomly running into or being found by another character without any explanation. And Enola is rarely the one doing the finding. (In fairness, they do explain one or two of these after the fact, but it still feels a bit coincidental.)

There is simply no intelligence or wit on display anywhere. If you think beyond what's directly shown to you and keep track of the off-screen characters, you'll notice some silly things happen. For instance, one character is able to traverse the countryside and then arrange and conduct a meeting with another character in the same span of time it takes a third character to wander through the woods. There's another instance where one character creates a coded message with a cypher that there is no reason to think that they have access to.

Worst of all, there isn't even any sort of denouement. Even when a mystery is mediocre, it can still be interesting to see how it gets resolved. Not the case here. The plot just kind of... settles itself. There's nothing interesting at all. The motive behind the assassinations on the viscount is ridiculous—it seems like an overreaction to a contrived situation that could have been accomplished much more easily without murder, or even with a murder of plenty of other people—and the story behind the mom is too vague to explain anything.

Plus, as I said at the beginning of the review, Enola doesn't even do the solving. With respect to every major "mystery" of the movie, Enola is either completely wrong, actively harmful, or completely irrelevant to the resolution.

The movie feels so bizarre to me, because Enola Holmes is huge on feminism and girl power, but Enola doesn't actually do anything noteworthy. Why focus so much on your original title character when you don't use her? The fact that Enola plays no active part in resolving the plot makes all the talk of female empowerment throughout the movie ring hollow. I also feel like Mycroft gets the short end of the stick. He's depicted as petty, controlling, and bigoted. While I suppose that they might have needed a "villain" for Enola's personal life, they even go so far as to say that Mycroft lacks Sherlock and Enola's gift of intellect, whereas in the original stories he was more intelligent than Sherlock himself (just much, much lazier). Even Inspector Lestrade gets to show off in the movie while Mycroft has absolutely no redeeming qualities.

That's not to say Enola Holmes is a total wash; the movie was very well-made. The costuming and sets perfectly conjure an image of idyllic Victorian England. There were also some nice jokes and gags. Millie Bobby Brown's charisma is able to effortlessly carry the movie as a lighthearted adventure for kids. Just make sure you have less than no expectations for the movie as a mystery.