On the morning of her 16th birthday, Enola Holmes (Millie Bobby Brown) wakes up to a surprise that her mother Eudoria Holmes (Helena Bonham Carter) has gone missing leaving behind few clues, maybe she wants to be found out. Enola who has been brought up in very different manner by her mother, now has to face her brothers Sherlock Holmes (Henry Cavill) and Mycroft Holmes (Sam Claflin) who are eager to send Enola to a finishing school for proper young ladies, more of a institution that converts young ladies into robots for men. But Enola runs away to London trying to find her missing mother and solve the mystery behind her disappearance, and on the way she falls into another mystery surrounding a young runaway Lord Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge) she meets on the train who is unaware of a dangerous conspiracy he's involved in.
Starts off like you expect a Holmes based detective case solving story, but soon it becomes something different entirely. We here are shown how Enola tries to suddenly enter the real world, and not only search for her mother, but also find herself growing in the new dangerous and tough situations she faces on her own and then there's a little romantic angle with mysterious Tewkesbury. This storyline maybe would work for teenage audience, but for others like me it was a disappointment and not really much to enjoy.
It also didn't help that Henry Cavill felt awfully miscasted as Sherlock almost like he had no personality, that witty one liners or the 'sociopath' attitude (was there very slightly), all of which previously we had enjoyed in Benedict Cumberbatch and Robert Downey Jr's versions. Then we get a fictionalised different version of Mycroft which was a headache to watch for the kind of anti-feminist he is. It was a major disappointment as I was looking forward to Sam Claflin's act. When he was trying to control Enola and she runs off, I felt thank god they didn't go that route, only to return to same narrative much later on, grr!
Even if I ignore these problems as in anycase its Enola and Twekesbury who get more screentime, issue is both sub-plots of mother disappearance and why people want Tewkesbury dead, leads to not so interesting adventures which is what Holmes world should consist of. The movie may have worked better if they didn't try to do too much, and stuck with just mother's motives, explore more of her feminism angle and Enola's attempts to find her mother, while outdoing Sherlock. The whole Tewkesbury plot just spoils the narrative and it just becomes more of neither here and nor there.
I have not seen Millie Bobby Brown in anything else than 'Stranger Things' and she was fun to watch, liked those 4th wall dialogues she would often do (not overdone thankfully), and she had a nice cute chemistry going with Louis Partridge.
Enola Holmes doesn't work for me mainly because it's more of a fictional different take of Sherlock's little sister, not the kind I was expecting from the trailer. Just about watchable but have to manage some cringeworthy sequences on the way.
My Rating : 5/10
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