As a life-long Sherlock Holmes fan, I will most likely check out the latest Sherlock Holmes-related media that get under my radar. Thus, there was no way I was missing Enola Holmes.
In this reimagination, Sherlock (Henry Cavill) and Mycroft Holmes (Sam Claflin) have a younger sister named Enola (Millie Bobby Brown). While the Holmes brothers are out in the world making names for themselves in their chosen careers, Enola is left to be raised by their mother Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter) in their ancestral home. Eudoria raises Enola up in a manner that’s atypical for girls. With daily lessons ranging from literature to science to chess to jujitsu, Eudora proceeds to strengthen both Enola’s mind and body.
Then, on the day of her sixteenth birthday, Enola wakes up with her mother gone. Equipped by the unorthodox upbringing and training she got from her mother, and guided only by the clues that her mother left behind, she decides to travel to London and look for her. At the same time, she has to evade her pursuing brothers – which is no easy feat, considering that the older is a powerful government official and the younger is the world’s greatest detective. If they ever catch up to her, she will be sent to the finishing school of the strict Miss Harrison (Fiona Shaw).
While on the run, she meets a young lord named Viscount Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge), who has also run away from home and is being hunted by an assassin named Linthorn (Burn Gorman). She initially doesn’t want to get entangled with his issues, but eventually, she decides to help him – taking on her very first case as a lady detective.
Enola Holmes is not the most striking Sherlock Holmes reimagination I’ve ever encountered, but I did have fun with it. Although the script isn’t as tight as it could be – there are plot threads that I thought went nowhere (unless the intention was for a sequel to address them), and developments that I found kind of lazy – the storytelling is charming, winsomely energetic, and has dashes of cleverness. The twists-and-turns are well-executed, albeit a bit predictable, and its novel spins on the mythology have reasonable merits.
It’s most notably refreshing quirk is Enola’s fourth-wall breaks. While it seems a bit too Dora the Explorer-esque at times, it’s generally complementary with the tone that it was going for – a more playful and youthful version of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes movies.
On the other hand, I’m not particularly a fan of its characterization of Mycroft. Canonically, he’s supposed to be as smart as or smarter than Sherlock, and yet, in this version, he’s intellectually average compared to Sherlock and Enola. Worse, he’s bitter and pompous. That being said, this specific characterization does serve the narrative well.
Another thing that didn’t sit well with me is the aspect of its social commentary that seems to argue that employing terrorism is acceptable for the sake of a perceived reform – which is a message I abhor at face value. However, one may also contend that it isn’t really saying that, since in the story, the “reform” in question wasn’t achieved through terrorism, but as a result of Enola’s decision to do the right thing despite its cost to her (i.e. help Tewkesbury). Nevertheless, the movie made no definitive condemnation of that aforementioned destructive view, nor did the character who held such view explicitly repented from it.
In the end, I like Enola Holmes. Apart from being just another exploitation of the Sherlock Holmes property, it’s a genuinely enjoyable, stylish, and engaging Victorian mystery caper headlined by a sharp, endearing heroine.
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