"If you stay true to yourself, the path will always find you again."
Hello everyone!
Looking at you, The Next 365 Days.
Yes, I'm still debating whether or not I'll sacrifice some more of my brain cells to watch that, as I've already seen the first two, but I digress.
Because tonight's choice has absolutely nothing to do with anything Italian mafia related.
Rather, we take a step back into the past to Victorian England.
And we have a look at the youngest of the Holmes brood once more.
Yep, that's right, it's time to pay a visit to the England of cabbies, top hats, chaperones and corsets, and just what on Earth was going on with the suffragette movement at the time.
Our sleuth is here to help us. We're talking Enola Holmes 2.
Links to previously-related blog posts can be found at the bottom of the page.
If you remember, in the first movie, Enola's looking for her mother in London, but actually discovers a whole lot more about Eudoria's (Helena Bonham-Carter) motivations, trying to make the world a better place for her sixteen-year-old daughter.
In the end, she becomes the ward of none other than Sherlock Holmes, sleuth extraordinaire, and this is where movie two begins.
See, Enola (Brown) wants to be a detective too, like her brother, but unfortunately for her she's both a girl and much too young for people to take her seriously, while Sherlock (Cavill) is literally drowning in cases. So when she's almost ready to give up and basically closes up shop since she has no funds to keep it going, a young girl comes to her asking if she'd be able to locate her sister.
Sarah Chapman's disappeared, you see. And she was a Match Girl.
This is important because the movie covers a fictionalized version of actual events, since Sarah Chapman fought for women's working rights back in the day, though in this movie Enola eventually discovers it's something else entirely.
She goes undercover into the factory, figuring out Sarah stole something from the ledgers, and following one of the other workers to her second job, a sort of dance club that the rich and seedy use to entertain themselves watching half-dressed girls prance around on stage. It turns out that Sarah met someone there, someone important to her, so Enola thinks she might have run off with the bloke for a bit.
She also helps a drunken Sherlock home to 221B Baker Street, realizing her brother is a recluse and potentially rather lonely, considering, and also that his latest case is driving him up and down the walls.
She's not quite so astute when it comes to her flame, Lord Tewkesbury (Partridge), who's making a name for himself in the House of Lords as a great supporter of change, though she does keep an eye on him - or at least that's what she tells herself, and him, when he catches her.
Figuring out her next clue - a terrible poem - she finds the other worker murdered on the bed, and while she acquires a second clue at that time, she also gets herself chased by the police because Superintendent Grail (Thewlis) is apparently on the hunt to discredit the Holmes name. Enola ends up hiding with Holmes himself, who knows she's there but covers for her with Lestrade when the other comes a-knocking.
And listen, I was all hopeful about Lestrade, but as soon as he starts fanboying over a pipe, I figure he's going to be another bumbler. Dismissed, detective.
Anyway, Enola confides her findings to Holmes, who immediately recognizes a cypher it took his sister a third of the movie to decode, not to mention given there's a body already, the chances of them piling up are incredibly high. He tells her to stay put while he has a look, and we're treated to one of the best scenes, in my opinion, because we FINALLY get to see Sherlock use his influence when two policemen open their mouths to bar his entry to the crime scene.
"Don't be ridiculous," says our sleuth without even breaking stride, heading in.
WE NEED MORE OF THAT. Sherlock Holmes could go anywhere and was widely respected, so I'm hopeful the movies continue to expand in this direction.
But I digress.
While he's out and about, Enola realizes she made a mistake identifying the flower signature Sarah's lover used, and clocks into the fact it's got to be the son of the match factory's owner, so off she goes to attend the ball that Tewkesbury invited her to, where we get to see the two of them waltz together in a rather cute little scene that reminds us they're both still very VERY young.
Of course, Enola has little to no clue how to behave in society like this one, so she's a bit like a bull in a China shop, which ends with her imprisonment by Grail, who sentences her to the noose because he's fabricated evidence against her.
Oh yes, this right after insulting her for being a woman and daring to THINK, but he isn't counting on the fact that Sherlock will never believe a policeman over his own sister - who had sworn to him she never touched anything but the wound on the dying woman to try and staunch the bleeding - so that's a miscalculation. Sherlock heads over to Eudoria's friend with the jiu jitsu school, asking for help.
The women bust Enola out of there and beat up their pursuers while they're at it, leaving Grail to stand there over the disaster.
Enola then returns to London to figure out the rest, apologising to Tewkesbury and asking him for help like her mother advised (Eudoria has an EUREKA moment where she realizes she raised her three children to be too individual rather than team players). They go to visit the match factory where she runs into Sherlock again, who explains that their two cases are connected - he's been following a money trail, figuring out that someone named Moriarty has been leading him on a merry dance.
And considering it seems to center around the Treasury, and a politician they know, not to mention the match girls dying of the cheaper phosphorus they work with every day rather than typhus, it all feels like a huge conspiracy.
Unfortunately, they find Sarah's lover William dead in their investigations. But Tewkesbury helps the two Holmes siblings deduce where they need to go next from a sheet of music, which leads them back to the seedy theatre club, and there they finally find not just Sarah (who'd been posing as an aristocrat all movie) but the evidence, too.
Aaand that's where the final fight against Grail and his men occurs as brother and sister and the Lord all make the most of the gifts they're given, including but not limited to boxing, fencing, and Sherlock getting thrown through things to destroy them with his bulk; this ends when Enola uses a hook to kill Grail, but of course it isn't all that easy, either.
See, the REAL driving force behind this was always Moriarty - and it turns out it's a bit of a twist on the name Mira Troy, secretary to the politician they all thought was behind this.
Well, alright, he's behind the cheap phosphorus scheme, but not the rest. Mira's arrested, and the politician destroys the evidence they had against him, but Tewkesbury promises retribution since he was there and saw everything (also there was Lestrade, too). He brings it to fruition later, because he keeps his promises.
And Sarah? Sarah leads a little rebellion against the match factory, leading the girls to walk out (with Enola by her side), while Enola sets up shop at the jiu jitsu school even though Sherlock asks her to lodge with him and partner up.
In an exciting turn of events though, because she can see that the two of them do work better in teams, Enola sends a potential lodger her brother's way (while happily stepping out with her new beau, Tewkesbury).
It's someone Holmes fans know and love well.
Enter, Dr. John Watson!
FIN.
MAN I LOVED THIS MOVIE. I was skeptical of the first one to begin with, and I as incredibly nervous about this as well, especially given Sherlock's bigger role in it. But whoever's writing the scripts for these knows what they're doing. Enola is never pictured as smarter than her brother right off the bat, and never actually becomes smarter, either. You can see it in scenes where she learns from his observation skills, how much faster he is than her, but how much she advances just by working with him, as shown at the end of the movie.
And Sherlock is never actually too cuddly or emotional, but he IS exactly as readers remember him: dedicated to the people he cares about. There are painfully few of those, but his sister makes the list, considering the pains and lengths he goes to, to ensure she doesn't hang.
Enola's journey into becoming more confident in her own abilities and slowly realizing it's okay to ask for help is also beautiful, as is the development of her romance with Tewkesbury, which was only hinted at during the first film. Here though, the two teens are pretty neatly depicted, and it feels like a naturally soft progression to their first kiss and then decision to try this out for size, nothing forced about it, and I'm just tickled because of how endearingly clumsy they both are.
Also by the fact that Sherlock is right there watching this in amusement, but somehow becomes a gentle guidance for both the teens through the course of the movie to help steer them - as someone with a ward should be.
I would like to express thanks on behalf of Henry Cavill as well, because whoever costumed the movies listened to commentary on the first: Sherlock can now MOVE and doesn't look like he's wearing a strait jacket every time he shows up in Victorian clothing.
I did enjoy the running gag of everyone and their mother making note that Cavill isn't exactly Victorian gentleman-size, though. From Enola commenting he's heavy like two elephants, to saying she should have been fed like him growing up, right down to him having 'very recognizable shoulders', I loved it. The movie doesn't take itself too seriously, but it never devolves into insults either as this is a light-hearted gag throughout.
Overall, the only quibbles I have are some face close-ups and slow motions that felt a bit jarring, most notably Grail screaming dramatically when thwarted, Sherlock's face riding in a coach to the dramatic conclusion, and Enola falling in exaggerated slow-motion for some reason. They felt a bit too on the nose.
But other than that, the movie did things VERY right. They gave Enola a natural learning curve and progression, they kept up an engaging mystery, they didn't make the romance feel forced or had it overshadow the rest, and they gave Sherlock clothing that actually enabled him to be an active participant rather than a statue of a Greek God.
AND THEY GAVE US WATSON!
All in all, if there ever is a third movie? Sign me up.
xx
*images and video not mine
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