Saturday 26 September 2020

Enola Holmes (2020)

 Millie Bob Brown is good in this, with a convincing Bonham-Cartery accent. She's about the only thing that is, though, and I gave up on it after about an hour.

It's a mess narratively (a bunch of different storylines that it alternates between rather than entwining together, characters that drop out of the story for long periods, stopping for a three minute lecture on white male privilege) and stylistically (full of unecessary, excessive business like intercutting with flashbacks of her training, or Fleabagging to camera).

The detecting is rubbish, too - she either solves simple anagrams or by pure coincidence happens to be in the same room as key pieces of various mysteries, and often misses staggeringly obvious clues or points of basic logic.

Purports to have a feminist spin but almost immediately gives her a bland pretty boy to argue with for two minutes before falling for. Judging from elements like this boy crush and dress-up montage it's aimed at young teenage girls, but it underestimates them - they'd be much better off reading the original Sherlock Holmes stories or at least watching something smarter.

(Some minor nitpicks: Mycroft is reimagined from 'indolent yet brilliant' to 'stupid misogynist arsehole', which perhaps makes him less redundant but also less interesting; they use the Greenwich Naval College location over and over, as well as a 'experimental motor car' scene, both of which always show up in Holmesian London movies; Bonham-Carter joins Cruise, Cage, Cusack etc in the ranks of actors in their 50s who refuse to allow a grey hair on their heads, especially glaring here as she plays a range of 15 years or so.)

Rating: Bad.

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