Enola Holmes is utter dreck, a mediocre mystery wrapped in the cloak of a superior writer’s creation and some quality set design, wasting two solid actresses on a script desperate to tell you how clever it is. There have been worthwhile adaptations and continuations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work and iconic character, but this is just plain boring.
Enola Holmes, you see, is Sherlock and Mycroft’s younger sister, a fabrication by the author Nancy Springer for a series of books that posit that this 14-year-old girl, unmentioned by Doyle, was as quick-witted as her older brothers, with a special talent for cryptography. When her brothers try to send her off to finishing school, she absconds to London and starts a detective agency of her own, specializing in missing persons cases (as, I presume, murder was a bit much for the young adult literature market).
This Netflix adaptation of the series’ first book, The Case of the Missing Marquess, starts with Enola (Millie Bobby Brown, so critical as El on Stranger Things) at home with her mother (Helena Bonham Carter), but when the latter vanishes, Enola’s brothers show up to decide her fate. Mycroft is especially disdainful of her most unladylike ways and thus the stronger advocate of sending her off to a finishing school run by a Miss Harrison (Fiona Shaw, also wasted in a minor role), while Sherlock (Henry Cavill, decidedly un-super here) equivocates and shows a soft spot for his younger sister. Enola takes off and encounters another fugitive, Lord Tewksbury, and the two pair up while on the run, separating in London before circumstances throw them together again – while both are pursued by a mysterious, creepy man named Linthorn who looks too much like a young Willem Dafoe. Enola tries to secure her freedom while figuring out the mystery around Tewksbury’s flight and avoiding her brothers and the interference of Inspector Lestrade.
The story is a convoluted mess, overly reliant on coincidence and failing to give Enola enough of a reason to solve the Tewksbury tangle. Enola’s character is just Sherlock as a teenaged girl, transmuting his disregard for rules and cold manner into a mischievous pixie who breaks the fourth wall with irritating frequency. (And of course she has to say “the game is afoot,” a hackneyedphrase Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes said exactly one time in all of the stories.) She takes off for London with a pile of money her mother presciently left hidden for her in a location she’s disguised with a cipher that Enola cracks, and has little trouble tracking her mother’s movements through the London underground – that’s another preposterous subplot that I won’t spoil because it’s just so stupid. While there, she just bumps into Tewksbury again, because the story needs them to run into each other.
The Sherlock character is a softer and kinder version of the one present in most of the stories and in film versions, which has made the film the subject of a peculiar lawsuit by the Doyle estate. (The character of Sherlock is in the public domain because most of the works that include him have lost their copyright protection; the estate claims that this film uses a later version of Sherlock where he shows emotion, and thus isn’t in the public domain.) This poses two problems: It’s not the Sherlock most of us know from canon or from depictions like Benedict Cumberbatch’s, and it also makes Sherlock really, really boring. There are no pithy observations, no witty ripostes, and none of the charm of watching his brain at work, which is a huge part of the appeal of Doyle’s writing – the same as it is for Agatha Christie’s Poirot or Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Wimsey.
This feels more than anything like an attempt to profit from someone else’s creation, because it’s devoid of anything original or interesting. Brown might play the single most important character in Stranger Things‘ ever-growing ensemble, although I think there are times the script pushes her to overact. She never inhabits this character, however, and the reason is probably that the character itself is two-dimensional and cartoonish. For a movie that’s been heavily hyped and received positive reviews, Enola Holmes is a shocking dud. If you’re a fan of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, you’d do well to stay away.