2/5
Harry Bradbeer’s Enola Holmes is an uneven mess of a film. Millie Bobby Brown shows the limits of her range as a performer – she’s a bit too earnest and stilted and the dialect never fully lands. Henry Cavill’s Sherlock Holmes is charming, but the rest of the cast are merely caricatured villains or antagonists for Enola to square off against. As soon as the plot kicks into gear and “the game is afoot,” it can be a thoroughly delightful and pleasantly entertaining diversion. But whenever it dips into its teenage romance subplot, the film turns tedious and plodding, finding itself bogged down by a milquetoast romantic interest and no chemistry between the performers. However, worse than this are the narrative digressions that take us away from the central mystery (or really, mysteries) of the film, such as the nearly twenty minutes spent at a boarding school that is completely incidental to the rest of the film. And when the resolution to one of the film’s major mysteries (what happened to Enola’s mother?) is handled so haphazardly, the film winds up ending on a completely unsatisfying note.