Enola Holmes 2

Sherlock’s younger sister is back for a rousing adventure involving a real-life feminist campaigner.

A run for their money: Millie Bobby Brown

There are advantages to being a girl. And this in the year of 1888, when Jack the Ripper was terrorising the streets of London. In the words of Enola Holmes, who has started up her own detective agency, she can “go to places others can’t, explore where others won’t. And I can fight. I know jujitsu.” But Enola is just a child, and this is Victorian England, and so her detective agency is a disaster. Her visitors are only interested in the services of her much older brother, Sherlock. Meanwhile, her mother Eudoria Holmes (Helena Bonham Carter), a militant suffragette on the run, is dispensing dynamite and small incendiary devices with gay abandon. So Enola is forced to close up shop, and as she’s packing up her boxes, her doorbell rings. It is her first customer, a little girl (a delightful Serrana Su-Ling Bliss) who works at the Bryant & May match factory, and whose sister, Sarah Chapman, has gone missing. Can Enola help? Of course she can!

Enola Homes (2000) saw a gap in the market and rightly reasoned that if the Time Lord can adopt a new gender, why not an heir to the throne of 221B Baker Street? The likes of Robin Hood, Tarzan and James Bond have skated long enough on the coattails of testosterone. So the American children’s author Nancy Springer invented Enola Holmes, whose adventures on-screen were first chronicled in the eponymous Netflix film starring Millie Bobby Brown. It went on to garner a 78 million viewership, no small potatoes on a streaming platform. It was also a sizeable critical success.

If ambition is a fault, then Enola Holmes 2 suffers from it. Stuffed with adventure, intrigue, farce, action, social commentary and now romance, it attempts to kick all the boxes of popular entertainment. Yet while some of it is genuinely ridiculous, and Millie Bobby Brown pushes the comedy a little hard, the sequel is still a rousingly entertaining business. It is, after all, directed by Harry Bradbeer, he who steered Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag towards cultural iconography. Thus, every time Enola clocks the camera with that knowing, fourth-wall look, we feel the connection. She is a natural successor, being a female-empowered combo of Fleabag, Miss Marple, Nicola Adams and Johnny English. Rightfully described by Susie Wokoma’s Miss Edith as “a force of nature,” she is hard to resist. And, with the money that Millie Bobby Brown is reportedly being paid, she is unlikely to decline a third offering, in spite of the injuries she has sustained during her tenure at Netflix.

The evocation of Victorian London is rich in detail, and the fight choreography enormously inventive, while the plot twists and period touches are quite exhilarating. Indeed, the staggeringly prolific scenarist Jack Thorne has introduced a real-life thread to the drama, namely the 1888 Matchgirls’ strike. And the very real activist Sarah Chapman is introduced as a key character, played with steely grace by Hannah Dodd, who could well be our next Gemma Arterton. I say that Jack Thorne is prolific, but he really is: this is just one of three of his screenplays released this year, following the three he wrote since 2020 – and that doesn’t even include the recent TV series The Eddy and Criptales. That he maintains a consistently high standard in his writing is the stuff of miracles.

JAMES CAMERON-WILSON

Cast: Millie Bobby Brown, Henry Cavill, David Thewlis, Louis Partridge, Susie Wokoma, Adeel Akhtar, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Himesh Patel, Helena Bonham Carter, Hannah Dodd, Abbie Hern, David Westhead, Tim McMullan, Gabriel Tierney, Róisín Monaghan, Serrana Su-Ling Bliss, Lee Boardman. 

Dir Harry Bradbeer, Pro Mary Parent, Alex Garcia, Ali Mendes, Millie Bobby Brown and Robert Brown, Screenplay Jack Thorne, inspired by the character created by Nancy Springer, Ph Giles Nuttgens, Pro Des Michael Carlin, Ed Adam Bosman, Music Daniel Pemberton, Costumes Consolata Boyle, Sound Samir Foco, Andy Kennedy and Jason W. Jennings, Dialect coach Majella Hurley. 

Legendary Pictures/PCMA Productions-Netflix.
128 mins. UK/USA. 2022. UK and US Rel: 4 November 2022. Cert. 12A.