Summary
While it has some of the charms of its predecessor, Enola Holmes 3 doesn’t quite suit the more mature tone it’s going for, and the formula is beginning to wear increasingly thin.
Enola Holmes is one of the strange streaming curios that sprang up during the pandemic and felt like a novel distraction more than the beginning of a franchise. A spirited sequel that was arguably an improvement over the original helped to dispel this notion, but Enola Holmes 3 mostly left me feeling vindicated, with the formula running out of steam and the broader movie not knowing quite what to do with a star who’s aging out of the character’s initial peppy appeal.
There’s a case to be made that this is explicitly a franchise for a younger, female-skewing audience. It still has a similar sprightly energy to it, but it’s beginning not to suit Millie Bobby Brown, now visibly an adult woman whom the script sometimes calls upon to be distractingly childlike. What were once pretty nice coming-of-age lessons have now given way to overt grappling with Britain’s complicated colonial history. The more mature tone is a natural evolution in theory, but in practice I’m just not sure it works.
Playwright Jack Thorne returns to script duties, but this time he’s accompanied by Adolescence director Philip Barantini, and while there are no showy long takes or ham-fisted critiques of toxic masculinity, there’s something of that show’s troubled aging-too-quickly energy to this threequel all the same, mostly in its obvious lack of surety about where to take the plot, tone, and character.
This time, the action moves from England to Malta, where Enola (Bobby Brown, Damsel) is due to marry her limp high-society beau, Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge, Jay Kelly). She’s undecided on the nuptials and their implications for the Holmes name and the pastimes of a headstrong young woman, marriage in Victorian England being a rather one-sided institution, but she thankfully has other things to be busying herself with. Namely, that her brother, Sherlock (Henry Cavill, The Witcher), has been kidnapped.
More exotic, sun-drenched climes notwithstanding, Enola Holmes 3 feels like a much less expansive movie than the first two. The drama is more intimate, both in the sense of Enola’s internal strife – she’s not trying to determine her place in the entire world, just in someone else’s life and family – and in Maltese history under British colonial rule, so the setting isn’t used as an escapist paradise but instead a dark reflection of historic transgressions, which is a bit of a trendy, contemporary point of view. There are some half-decent set-pieces, but less than you might think, this being a shorter, cheaper movie more concerned with the process of figuring things out, both plot-wise and emotionally.
This leaves Millie Bobby Brown with a lot to do, as ever, and – this in a bit of whisper – I’m not sure she’s up to it. After getting her big break playing the most enigmatic character in a show that became a cultural phenomenon, I haven’t been especially compelled by anything she has done since, and here she finds herself caught between the buoyancy of the character’s earlier incarnations – the first two movies were four and six years ago, respectively – and the needs of a plot that has her genuinely weighing up getting married.
Luckily, the supporting cast continues to be solid, especially Helena Bonham Carter (Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials), who is the best thing about this series by a margin and walks off with the movie every time she turns up. Sharon Duncan-Brewster’s Moriarty might be considered a bit arch, but I don’t mind that in such a fundamentally silly movie. At least she commits to the bit. And I’m partial to Himesh Patel’s Dr. Watson, even though he gets next to nothing to do.
The overriding sense, sadly, is of a movie that’s running out of ideas. The change in scenery is welcome but underused by a script that feels a bit too self-loathing and apologetic for its own good, and I do wonder what this franchise has to offer when it’s no longer about a teenage super-sleuth toiling under the shadow of her famous brother. Netflix might always be on the lookout for a film franchise to call its own, but this one may have run out of road.
