Released on Netflix in 2020, Enola Holmes, based on the young adult mystery novel series by Nancy Springer, was a huge hit, a pandemic-struck housebound audience thirstily lapping up its lavish, quirky, tongue-in-cheek cod Victorian origin story for Sherlock Holmes’s feisty, fleet-footed, and smart-mouthed younger sister Enola (Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown). This quickly-commissioned sequel – again penned by the supernaturally-prolific Jack Thorne and again directed by Harry Bradbeer – is a significantly better film. The first film’s story was muddied by its need to set up Enola, her relationship with her brother, her own determination to establish herself as an independent, free-thinking young woman whose detective skills may well be the equal of Sherlock himself and, of course, the world its story was set in. The mystery element of the story was a little underwhelming too. Fortunately, Enola Holmes 2 is a nippier and more confident affair. With the groundwork laid and its world established, the film can crack on with the story – and it’s a good one. With her own detective agency on the brink of collapse, Enola is enlisted by a factory girl named Bessie (Serrana Su-Ling) to find her missing sister, a match factory girl named Sarah Chapman (Hannah Dodd). Sherlock meanwhile (Henry Cavill, woefully miscast as the most ridiculously Un-Sherlock Holmes of all time but giving it his all regardless) is struggling to solve his own latest case involving Government blackmail at the highest levels engineered, he eventually discovers, by a criminal mastermind known as Moriarty. As Enola finds herself digging deeper into the underbelly of London aristocracy and facing the grim reality of the pitiful lives of the girls working for slave labour wages at the match factory, the two investigations start to move closer together and Enola and Sherlock must join forces to expose a sinister web of deceit and duplicity.
Enola Holmes 2 is great fun. The plot hitches up its skirts and races along from the very first scene and the style and tone very much echo the original with Enola’s occasional cheeky fourth wall breaking as she addresses her “audience” and her growing friendship with the timid Lord Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge). Helena Bonham-Carter is back in a slightly larger cameo as Enola’s madcap mother Euphoria and David Thewlis’ villainous Grail is a baddie in the glorious penny dreadful tradition. Modern sensibilities are catered for with Adeel Akhtar’s all-at-sea Inspector Lestrade, a complete reinvention of Moriarty and, in a mid-credits sequence, the arrival of another Conan Doyle icon not yet introduced into this version of Sherlock’s world. But this is really Enola’s film and Millie Bobby Brown is a delight; Enola is possessed of the same mercurial intelligence as her brother but her lack of experience leads her to take uncalculated risks and she finds herself in tricky situations more often than she should. It’s a lively, atmospheric confection, nicely-realised, and Enola Holmes 2, busier and better structured and paced than the first film, sees this franchise find its feet and opens the door for further adventures to come.
Enola Holmes 2 is streaming now on Netflix
