Holmes Renovation

There's something about Sherlock Holmes that makes the character and his adventures incredibly popular to repurpose and adapt. (Something besides most of Doyle's stories now being in the public domain.) The new versions generally have an "above average" hit rate with me, so I was willing to give the movie Enola Holmes a chance.

Based on a young adult book series by Nancy Springer, this movie is the story of the teenage sister of Sherlock Holmes. Raised by a mother with the same razor sharp intelligence of her adult brother -- but largely cloistered from the world -- Enola embarks on an adventure of her own when her mother disappears for mysterious reasons.

I don't feel that I'm much of a "gatekeeper" when it comes to Sherlock Holmes. I've had few qualms with takes that have modernized it, or made prequels and sequels of it. Inventing a sister more than a decade younger than Sherlock seemed a fine hook from which to hang a new story. But it turns out this movie (and perhaps the books on which it's based) isn't actually interested in any of the trappings of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's writings. It just wants to trick you into watching this mostly unrelated tale.

The creation of a new Holmes protagonist would have been more interesting to me if the story had been at all faithful to any other elements of the classic stories. Instead, Enola Holmes gives us barely any Sherlock, a dim-witted Mycroft, and no Watson at all. It serves up some nice commentary on the subject of equality, but the "mystery" is quite transparent. The movie is as much an action-adventure as the Robert Downey Jr. take on Sherlock Holmes, but feels even farther removed from the source material.

There is a bright spot in the casting of Millie Bobby Brown. Given a role less emotionally constrained than the one that made her famous (Eleven on Stranger Things), she's quite charming as the title character. She monologues often to the camera with wry ease, kicks butt in the many action scenes, and generally steers the movie away from insultingly dumb and into intermittent fun. She's doing the heavy lifting all by herself, though. Helena Bonham Carter is practically typecast as Enola's mother, pulling traits from other movies and sleepwalking through her few scenes here. Henry Cavill is virtually charisma-free as Sherlock. And the film's various villainous types don't leave much of an impression at all.

The Enola Holmes book series has lasted several books; this could well be another of the many, many cases where a young adult book series simply doesn't work very well when put on film. (It's still a hell of a lot better than some.) I give this movie a C-. If there are any Millie Bobby Brown fans out there, you might enjoy it. Otherwise, I'd steer clear.