November 5, 2022
Because the public during Victorian England was apparently not yet ready to accept a young female detective, Enola Holmes (Millie Bobby Brown) was about to give up on her chosen career. However, one day, a little girl named Bessie (Serranna Su-Ling Bliss) hired Enola to help her find her missing sister Sarah (Hannah Dodd). To start getting evidence, Bessie brought Enola to work in the match factory where she and Sarah worked.
In the factory, Enola found a list of girls who have passed away in the past two years while working in the factory, allegedly victims of typhus. Enola found another match girl Mae (Abbie Hern) dying with knife stuck in her belly in an address she figured out from the words in a love poem she found in Sarah's room. The ruthless Superintendent Grail (David Thewlis) accused Enola of murder and was relentless in his efforts to apprehend her at all costs.
This was the much-awaited sequel of the successful first film about Sherlock Holmes' spirited baby sister Enola which came out on Netflix in 2020. In my review (LINK), I expressed my wish that hopefully the sequel will have more interaction between Enola and Sherlock and this wish was definitely fulfilled, as it would turn out that the two challenging cases Holmes and Holmes were working on would involve the same people.
Millie Bobby Brown was winsome and feisty as ever in the title role, with all the fourth-wall-breaking that she did to involve the audience in her thought processes. There were scenes here when she would go through how she figured out the meaning of puzzling clues left behind, although admittedly her logic can be rather overreaching. Enola and Tewkesbury trade lessons in fistfighting and waltzing in a romance which Brown's fans will find delightful.
The setting up of the case actually felt too lengthy, with nothing much happening for the first thirty minutes or so. It was only when we saw familiar characters like brother Sherlock (Henry Cavill) and love interest Tewkesbury (Lewis Partridge) that the pace and energy eventually picked up. Holmes matriarch Eudoria (Helena Bonham-Carter) also got involved in an action-packed prison break scene, along with the loyal Edith (Susie Wokoma).
As with several current Netflix, there was woke casting again in this one, this time involving major characters, which promise to show up more in future installments. Like the previous episode, there was also feminism and political activism once again in this one. This was not only about Enola's independent streak, but also in the character of Sarah Chapman, who turned out to be based on a real-life pioneer of gender and labor equality. 7/10.
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