Enola Holmes
Director: Harry Bradbeer
Writer: Jack Thorne
Based on: Nancy Springer‘s novels
Cast: Millie Bobby Brown, Louis Partridge, Henry Cavill, Sam Claflin, Helena Bonham Carter, Burn Gorman, Adeel Akhtar, Susan Wokoma, Hattie Morahan, David Bamber, Frances de la Tour, Fiona Shaw
Seen on: 13.11.2020

Plot:
Enola Holmes (Millie Bobby Brown) grows up alone with her mother Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter), her older brothers Mycroft (Sam Claflin) and Sherlock (Henry Cavill) long moved out to pursue their own lives. Enola loves the unconventional, wild lifestyle she has with her mother that includes fight trainings and bedroom tennis. But one day, Enola wakes and finds her mother gone. Her brothers try to take charge of her, but Enola has to figure out where her mother has disappeared to. So she runs away from home to London to find her.

Enola Holmes is sweet fun that tries maybe a tad too hard at times at had me raising my eyebrows a little at the solution at the end. But it is still fun overall.

Enola Holmes mostly lives off Millie Bobby Brown. Fortunately, her charm and her comedic timing are spot on, so she carries the film very comfortably, giving life to its fast pace and a little crammed structure. The short appearances of Cavill, Claflin and Bonham Carter are also fun, but really, she runs the show here, and that’s good.

For a film that has such an unconventional protagonist, the film does have a suprisingly conservative streak, though. There is the whole subplot surrounding Tewkesbury that basically seems to advocate that for change to happen, the powerful people have to accept their power and then we can do everything with democratic processes. I am sorry for democracy, but that just doesn’t work. Sometimes you need a revolution and a complete overhaul of power structures. Unfortunately, the people working towards revolution here are literally labeled dangerous and shown to be making bombs. This whole “change the system from within” mentality is very dubious to me, at least if its applied exclusively.

But apart from that, I very much enjoyed Enola Holmes, despite the fact that I’m not much of a Sherlock Holmes fan. I am sure that for Holmes aficionados, the film probably hits differently and maybe not always in the right way since Cavill’s Sherlock has much more of a sense of humor than I expected any Sherlock incarnation to ever have. But I didn’t mind it at all.

In any cases, I can see my nieces enjoying this film and having fun with a hero like Enola. And I’m sure I would have enjoyed her when I was a kid – I still did now, but maybe with a little more distance.

Summarizing: Entertaining.