Enola Holmes 3
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: PG-13
Run Time: 1 hour 45 Minutes
Stars: Millie Bobby Brown, Henry Cavill
Writers: Jack Thorne, Nancy Springer
Director: Philip Barantini
Streaming on Netflix
There is an appealing sense of intrigue that comes with picking up a film series at its third installment without having seen the first two episodes; it requires head-on-a-swivel attentiveness as you try to tweeze out the relationships among the characters, adjust to their well-established quirks, and suss out the preexisting story arcs that may or may not be resolved in this particular two hours.
It’s sort of like making a new friend and absorbing their backstory via osmosis.
Still, hopping onto the third car of a moving narrative train works as an entertainment exercise only if the cast is inherently appealing, the direction is consistently crisp, and the plot of the moment successfully stands alone.
Happily, for the most part, Enola Holmes 3 – the further adventures of Sherlock Holmes’s gifted younger sister – pulls off that trifecta to the point where I’m seriously considering catching up with episodes one and two. The original film is now six years old; the sequel came out two years later. Both register in the 90s on Rotten Tomatoes, which led me to wonder how I could have missed even hearing about the series until now.
Millie Bobby Brown (Stranger Things) stars as Enola, a young woman so uncharacteristically spunky for Elizabethan England she has not only mastered the art of hand-to-hand combat, but also the art of breaking the fourth wall, confiding in her movie audience with pithy asides and keen observations. Deceptively doe-eyed and feminine in that strait-laced, late Dickensian manner, Enola is defiantly independent, choosing to use her apparently inherited deductive powers to help people of London’s lower classes – while big brother Sherlock (Man of Steel’s Henry Cavil) caters to the city’s moneyed elite.
I’m guessing the first two installments benefitted from lots of snappy banter between these super-smart siblings, who alternately provoke each other and pick each other’s brains. Not so much here, though, as Sherlock is almost immediately kidnapped on the island of Malta while attending Enola’s disastrously aborted wedding to the Viscount Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge, who it is no insult to describe as one of the prettiest people in the whole movie).
For once, Enola is forced to solve a mystery without the help or advice of her famous brother. She throws herself into the challenge with undisguised enthusiasm, chasing suspects through the crowded streets of Valetta, bonking bad guys with blunt objects – and mostly deducing the meaning of obscure and virtually invisible clues with what in another movie universe could only be described as Spidey Sense.
For sure, I could have benefitted now and then from a bit of foreknowledge. For instance, I believe I can be forgiven for my slowly dawning comprehension that in this series, Holmes’s arch enemy, Professor Moriarty, is a woman (nastily played by Dune’s Sharon Duncan-Brewster). And while the film’s belabored wedding finale no doubt offers a catharsis for those who have for six years longed for Enola and her Viscount to finally tie the knot, for the uninitiated it plays out longer than the marathon good-bye scenes at the end of Peter Jackson’s Return of the King (I do believe, were I to return to the theater where I saw that film in 2003, I would find Bilbo and Frodo still on screen, standing on that boat, waving goodbye to the tearful Hobbits).
But isn’t that just like life? Every day is full of unanswered questions and characters with no predicate. Enola Holmes – bolstered by its delightful leads and a great supporting cast including Helena Bonham Carter (as the detectives’ literally explosive mum) and Himesh Patel (Yesterday) as Holmes’s sidekick, Dr. Watson – offers a fun mystery and lots of high-stakes action.
The ingredients are elementary, and the result is a diverting cinematic soufflé.
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Comments
I can summarize “Enola Holmes 3” in one word: adolescent. It appears to have been made in order to create interest among younger people and to have endless sequel possibilities. The overall tone and focus of the production did not engage me deeply, as “Foyle’s War”, “Endeavour”, “Elementary”, and other high quality productions have done. The plot is far below an average Arthur Conan Doyle creation, yet both the Holmes series starring Robert Downey, Jr. and the first two seasons of the series starring Benedict Cumberbatch proved that excellent writing is still quite possible.
Many moments in “Enola Holmes 3” are designed to charm the audience and make us take a breath, but they fall short of achieving this. In fact, the several times that Enola looks directly into the camera (“breaking the fourth wall”) fall far short of giving the audience special insight into her innermost and personal world, building a more direct bond with the audience, or even of being humorous. Sherlock is stiff rather than enigmatic and Enola is trapped in girlishness and foolishness that is unworthy of a Holmes, such as climbing on top of a racing stage coach to fire a rifle that could far more easily have been fired from the window. Despite the contrived fight scenes, we see very little evidence that Enola can move through the world with more ability than the average high school student (though I do grant that she is relentless). Worse, there is very little that suggests that either she or Sherlock have extraordinary powers of observation or deduction – save for noticing the Morse code message on a mirror. And in what world is Sherlock Holmes someone who can be kidnapped from his own bed?!? Helena Bonham Carter, who I usually think very highly of, comes off as a caricature (mad mommy with bombs in her pockets) and looks like she had been recently taken off life support in order to do the filming.
By contrast, the parts of Professor Moiarty (played by Sharon Duncan-Brewster) and Viscount Tewkesbury (played by Louis Partridge) make the other generally dull performances look exactly like what they are: dull. Moiarty comes off the screen as energetic, maniacal, and deeply sinister. Tewkesbury is pleasant and gracious without becoming a bore and shows as good an ability to unravel clues and make insightful decisions as either of the Holmes siblings.
Nice costumes, though….