Enola Holmes

Sherlock Holmes fanfiction written (apparently) by a freshman Women's Studies major who lives on Tumblr. Has some of the most egregious examples of shoehorning anachronistic race and gender politics into a movie I've ever seen. By the time our Mary Sue protagonist discovers a women-only Jiu Jitsu dojo run by a sassy black woman in 1880s London, I was done.

Enola Holmes can't shake its conceptually flawed vibe as it throws in numerous plot elements, tones & stylistic trickery. Enola's moments of action & adventure are great, but the film suffers every time the Holmes connection is made or a conversation had. Ironically, Cavill delivers the better performance while Brown seems to compensate with loudness. Half-hearted 4th-wall breaks & a script steeped in manufactured misogyny and glossy-progressiveness are the weakest parts of the film.

Such a strong, promising opening but quickly nosedived and never recovered with cheap green screen, no chemistry or reason for the young romance, monotonous 'mother' flashbacks before every action Enola is forced to take, and a dull underlying story. The feminist bell is rang loud and clear throughout as well just in case we might have missed it ten minutes previously and the ten minutes before that ... etc etc. Maybe this is aimed purely at kids, I dunno, it just seemed to have more potential

Too many Netflix movies feel like a pilot to a TV series we'll never get to see. This, with its shorthand characters and approximately 13 different plots, bucks the trend by feeling more like an entire TV series we never got to see, edited down to 2 hours with a hacksaw.

A plot, Enola searches for her mom, B plot Enola searches for her bf, C plot, Sherlock searches for Enola, D plot Mycroft tries to put Enola into a boarding school, E plot, Scotland Yard gets involved, F plot, hitman, G plot, suffrage, H plot... My lord what a clusterfuck and a disappointment! The ending hardly made sense. I was very let down by the gaping plot hole where Sherlock was woefully ignorant of plot developments he SHOULD have known since he talks to Mycroft on a daily basis...