Enola Holmes 2
Director: Harry Bradbeer
Writer: Jack Thorne, Nancy Springer, Arthur Conan Doyle (original creator of Sherlock Holmes)
Starring: The fifth prime number, the love interest from Fight Club, Superman, the God of War (but not THAT one), and Louis Patridge (Sorry. I couldn’t find another thing I had seen this guy in)
Reason for watching: Because God forbid we ever stop making stuff to do with Sherlock Holmes
***
“Hear me out, guys. What if Sherlock Holmes had a spunky 16-year-old sister? And she was good at solving mysteries too?” Wow! That’s awesome! We can definitely sell that. Who are you thinking could play this sister? “Well we are Netflix so we have that girl from Stranger Things. People like her, and she’s actually British.” Perfect. We can get some other stars to play smaller parts. Any ideas for themes or the story? “No. Just mysteries.” Don’t wanna say anything significant about gender roles in the 1800s? I think there’s a lot we can work with there. “Nah. I don’t care. Let’s just make as many 2022-era jokes as we can. Make it as cookie-cutter as possible. It’ll work. Maybe we’ll get a sequel out of it.”
If you hadn’t gathered from that incredibly jaded intro/fake statement I am talking about Enola Holmes 2 this week, a new release from Netflix. A sequel to the surprise streaming hit from 2020, we follow Enola Holmes (Millie Bobby Brown) as she tries to make it on her own as a private detective in London. Getting out of the shadow of her older brother Sherlock (Superm…I mean Henry Cavill) has proven to be a challenge and her abilities are always called into question because of her age and gender. But when a young woman goes missing from a matchstick factory, the only person who can help is Enola! With help from Sherlock, her mother Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter), and her 1800s British boyfriend Tewkesbury (Louis Patridge), Enola will stop at nothing to uncover this conspiracy and find the missing girl.
First of all, Millie Bobby Brown is a talent. After four seasons of Stranger Things playing a socially awkward and super-powered teen, it is clear that she has acting chops. Add that to two Godzilla movies, and she is a bonafide star as well. She may not be able to carry a franchise (as she has a lot of of help in both those franchises), but she is the engine of these two Enola films. Credit where credit is due, a less charismatic actress could not pull off this role and make these movies enjoyable. The rest of the cast is fine as well, but largely unremarkable. With other stars like Cavill and Bonham Carter, that’s a bit of a disappointment, but their screen time is limited. (Cavill was probably too busy reminding DC how much they needed him to come back as the last son of Krypton.) So what can you do?
That being said, I find a lot of this movie to be a simple rinse-and-repeat of familiar mystery and then comedy beats from the last couple of years. Characters make witty remarks about each other and throw barbs about their times. Enola gets confused by high society traditions. None of it is new, but it’s tolerable. I can only hear so many jokes about how Enola thinks everyone she knows is an idiot though.
Now the bigger issue I take with this movie, in general, is its comments on gender roles. Throughout the movie, we have obvious evidence that Enola is capable of solving mysteries and defending herself. She is a very talented and versatile detective. As a fighter she holds her own against grown men at least twice her size. But two of the biggest roles in the movie are Sherlock, a mentor figure who gives her legitimacy and helps her win her battles, and Tewkesbury, her love interest and ticket into high society. While she gets in her digs at both of them she still needs them to complete her investigation and find out the villains here. That cuts the movie’s message about a young woman’s capabilities off at its knees by having her rely on them.
Part of me wonders if we needed either of these characters to be in the movie this much if at all. What do they really bring to the table? Tewkesbury is a love interest in a movie that is meant to be, at its core, about empowering young women. Sounds very redundant to me. Why not just have his screen time be a young woman who can be a Watson to Enola’s Sherlock? Now we’re giving more screen time to a young actress and we can add in an extra layer to the message by having Enola learn to work with someone. Now for Sherlock, he has to be at least a small presence here as his name is on the poster. So we can’t just cut him out, but why not just make him a lot smaller? Heck, make him a cameo that only appears near the end. Let him be the RDJ version and let this movie be the most insane pseudo-sequel since Split. That would be interesting. We could get a crossover third movie! I would love to see those two throwing witty banter back and forth with hot Dumbledore/Watson tagging along.
I suppose my last thought here is wondering if Brown is going to be the prototype of Gen Z stars going forward. Just attached to three franchises and constantly producing movies or seasons based on big IP, it does not seem to leave a lot of room for great stars to find passion projects that they love. It’s more like a recipe for a star than anything, and that is not exactly what stardom used to be. Some stars hit it big early on while others steadily got more notoriety with time by doing little projects, but no one ever got famous the same way in show business. And movies like this make me wonder what the careers of stars will look like 20-30 years. It’s a mystery to be solved.
6/10
Until I see another one