Pick an upbeat word, any upbeat word, and there’s a very good chance the dictionary will say point you straight to Enola Holmes 2.
Leaving aside why the good burghers of dictionary-dom would do this, save for the fact that they, like us, have been utterly beguiled by the sparkly wit and perkiness of the very much welcome sequel to 2020’s pandemic blue-breaking Enola Holmes, the truth of the matter is that after watching this emotionally substantial, confected delight of a film that you will indeed believe you could turn to “vivacious”, “witty”, “clever”, “buoyant”, “hilarious” and thoughtful in any dictionary and find the definition mentioning Enola Holmes 2 somewhere in its definition.
The truth is that this delightfully postmodern riff on Sherlock Holmes (played with handsome assuredness by Henry Cavill), which giddily and without apology suggests that his younger sister Enola (Milly Bobby Brown), is a heartwarming, soul-cheering, body-energising injection of verve and heady joy that also manages to make, with the elegance and skill of a top-rate ballet dancer, a few salient points about justice, feminism and the grindingly enervating wheels of bigotry, misogyny and societal constructs of the dinosauric kind.
It is that rare and precious cinematically comic beast that leaps deftly and with a mischievous wink and a nod, breaking fourth walls and conventions with zestful alacrity, from one plot point to another without putting a single winningly amusing foot wrong while also being most sage and insightful about the human condition.
Directed by Harry Bradbeer to a screenplay by Jack Thorne (they co-devised the story) Enola Holmes 2 manages to re-invent the world of Sherlock from an avowedly feminist angle without feeling like its belabouring some wholly unwelcome polemic point.
That’s not an easy thing to pull off, with the scales all too often tipping one way or the other in similar undertakings, leaving you with a story that’s funny but emotionally empty, or one that makes some damn good points but has the humour leached out of it at some sort of harrowing land speed record.
The greater part of the film’s considerable appeal comes down to a buoyantly clever screenplay that balances pinpoint comic timing, a perky sense of self that’s as robust as the self belief of the Holmes siblings, who have been well-schooled, if quirkily shaped by their gleefully offbeat mother Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter who embodies both hilarity and sober wisdom in one thrillingly good package) and characters brought to life by actors who know how to be comedically clever and emotionally resonant all at once.
It is, honestly, proof you can have it all in a film, engaging your funny bone and your mind in one seamless narrative that takes a seemingly rudimentary plot focused on missing match girls, typhoid outbreaks, corruption and conspiracy to pervert the law and make lots of money – having said that, there is a indeed a lot afoot in this game which knows how to be archly intelligent without once being an insufferably clever bore – and runs with it for just over two action-packed, oneliner savvy, convention-busting minutes, never once outstaying its welcome.
In a sequel that avoids the curse of the follow-up with the same wit and determination of its eponymous character, Enola Holmes decides to set up her own detective agency, convinced she has what it takes, and she does by a significant degree over the male pretenders to her chosen calling (save for Sherlock himself, of course), to make a go of it in sleuthing in Victorian London.
Alas, the blinkered, unthinking people of the time, including more than a few women, can see past her gender, and she’s about to head home, tale between her legs, when a young girl named Bessie (Serrana Su-Ling Bliss) comes in begging her to help find her missing sister Sarah Chapman (Hannah Dodd) who was a real person whom the film somewhat faithfully represents.
What starts off as a simple missing persons case (as if it was ever going to be that), soon becomes a tangled web of all kinds of nefarious derring-do, a mystery so tangled up with the social mores and hierarchical inequity of the time that while Enola Holmes 2 is delighting us time and time again, often multiple times in the same full speed ahead scene, it’s also pointing out how darkly horrible people can be to each other if it means acquiring money and power and a horizon-gazing spot at the top of the social pile.
As it becomes more and more obvious that the cases of Sherlock and Enola are inextricably intertwined, the siblings end up working together once again, though Enola, ever mindful of the lowly place of women in a society determined, it sadly seems, to devalue half of its population to its own detriment, knows she must stay apart to a greater extent lest she be swallowed by her brother’s position as a famous, highly-lauded man solving crime.
Though Enola and Sherlock are great together, his grave outlook and her buoyancy of personality and empathy and care coming together perfectly in one mystery-solving unit, the truth is that the male-centred outlook of Victorian society will only ever see Sherlock.
So, Enola, though grateful for her brother’s deductive reasoning and support, must make her own way in the world, reminding everyone with pizzazz and a readily funny turn of phrase that she more than has what it takes to be as good a detective, if not better, than her brother.
Watching her leap from clue to clue, gathering them up like collector cards before arranging them just so in such a way that the game, which is most assuredly afoot, is well and truly pumping with vigorous energy, is one of the supreme delights of Enola Holmes 2 which is a fizzy bottle of fun but with a ferociously intelligent mind to match.
It is also a rom-com of sorts as avowedly independent Enola, whose mother begins to wonder if she made her far too self-reliant for her own emotional good, comes to realise that handsome, dashing, social justice-oriented Lord Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge) might be the perfect addition to her solo world which may not need him to make her way in the world or solve crimes, but who she desperately wants and needs for a whole host of other reasons that she only begins to discover in the film are as necessary as jujitsu and a witty, ferocious intelligence.
In a world which still can’t see how good women are much of the time, and which constantly underutilises one of its greatest assets, Enola Holmes 2 is a fun-filled pushback against male mediocrity which manages to creatively and imaginatively reinvent a well-loved literary character’s world while making all kinds of important necessary points about the capability of the women, and one feisty, funny, incisive one in particular who you love all the more by story’s end, while making us feel like a million, phosphorous-untainted dollars and ready to do what needs to be done because really who is going to stop us?