Movie Review: ENOLA HOLMES (2020)

In that long-lost year of 2019, I decided to enter the 21st Century and get Netflix streaming. Although the main shows I watched--The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance and V-Wars--weren't renewed, there was other fun content to be found. The Netflix production I ended up enjoying the most was Enola Holmes, so much so that I wrote a review of it for my Mailchimp newsletter and wrote an earlier post about the casting of an Indian actor to play Inspector Lestrade.

Now that a sequel has officially been announced, I figured I'd share my review with a broader audience.

The Plot

Britain's greatest detective Sherlock Holmes (Henry Cavill) didn't have just one sibling, older brother Mycroft (Sam Claflin), but a much, much younger sister Enola (Millie Bobby Brown). Sherlock and Mycroft were adults (or nearly so) when she was born and their father died soon after, leaving her to be raised by her eccentric mother Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter). Eudoria taught her all sorts of things that Victorian society wouldn't approve upper-class young ladies knowing (i.e. martial arts, explosive chemistry, etc.) and Enola is as extraordinarily intelligent and perceptive as her brother.

Then Eudoria disappears. Mycroft and Sherlock  investigate and Mycroft, vexed that Enola isn't by his standards particularly "ladylike," sends her to a ladies' finishing school run by the domineering Miss Harrison (Fiona Shaw). Enola runs away, seeking clues her mother left behind and stumbling across a conspiracy to kill the young Viscount Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge) that's connected to legislation that would expand voting rights in Britain. Meanwhile her two brothers are looking for her...

The Good

*Millie Bobby Brown does an absolutely amazing job as Enola. Seriously, she's the best part of the movie. She puts so much emotion into the part, both positive and negative, and she's so entertaining to watch. Her facial expressions in particular are often hilarious. Cavill and Claflin are good in their parts as well--although they're much less entertaining than Enola is, Cavil projects Holmes' intelligence and Claflin is downright hissable as Mycroft (more on that later). Although she's not in the movie very much, Carter's very good as well and the scenes between her and Enola have real poignance.

*The script is generally well-written. Enola has a running commentary on everything (including at times breaking the fourth wall) that made me laugh out loud several times. I'm sure the people near me at the gym (I watch a lot of Netflix on my Kindle on the elliptical or the bike) really appreciated that. :)

*The movie moves along at a quick clip and is rarely dull. It make running on the elliptical and ironing clothes so much more tolerable.

*The film gets a lot more political than I remember the Holmes stories being. The stories I've read seem to focus on him solving crimes and what-not, but during the time Sherlock would have lived (the last story is set at the start of WWI and he's a very old man), British society was rapidly changing. A major plot point are the Reform Bills (based on the time period I'm guessing The Representation of the People Act of 1884) and there was also a lot of agitation by women for the right to vote. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle might not have been interested in making his stories about "issues" (and in-universe Holmes might be too monomaniacal about solving crimes to care about politics), but this is a pretty interesting vein to mine.

*The importance of women being able to control their own money is a major plot point. To quote TVTropes, Some Anvils Need To Be Dropped.

The Bad

The characterization of Enola and Sherlock's older brother Mycroft is grossly unsubtle. The filmmakers needed a villain and apparently the people involved in a plot to murder a teenage boy weren't good enough. So they depicted a man characterized in the original books as being as smart as Sherlock but just too lazy to do anything with it into a cranky, snide reactionary (he's clearly disdainful of the Reform Bill) who's downright mean to Enola and is explicitly depicted as not having either of his siblings' intelligence. That last part is just really petty on the filmmakers' part, especially given what I said a minute ago about how in the source material he's as smart as Sherlock, just lazy and hidebound.

Yes, I imagine most Victorian men of their social class would find her exasperating and embarrassing, but she's still his younger sister. He can want to send her to a mind-numbing ladies' finishing school against her wishes and pull rank as her older brother (and legal guardian in the absence of her parents) without being that nasty. He also doesn't seem particularly concerned for well-being--a pretty young woman without much real-life experience on the run in Victorian Britain is probably in great danger and that should worry both him and Sherlock, but he seems more vexed that she's gotten out from under his control than concerned about her not getting raped, killed, etc. And as I mentioned earlier, just to make sure we know he's Bad, he thinks letting more people in Britain vote will be the downfall of the nation.

If the goal is to critique Victorian society as a whole rather than a few bad apples, he could still love his sister and mean well but still plan to to shove Enola's square peg into society's round hole because He's A Man And He Knows What's Best. It is possible for good people to make bad and even downright cruel decisions thinking it's The Right Thing To Do, so there was no need to make Mycroft into such a spiteful, mean-spirited jerk.

The Verdict

An absolutely delightful film and I hope there's a sequel. After all, the film is based on a book series. 9.0 out of 10. Oh and by the way, Netflix came up with a clever way to promote it.

ENOLA HOLMES: The Possibilities of an Indian Inspector Lestrade

In the recent Netflix series Enola Holmes, the police officer Inspector Lestrade is played by Adeel Akhtar, who is of Pakistani background. In the original stories, there's no indication that Lestrade was anything but a white Briton (although his name is actually French) and someone online suggested this was simply a case of colorblind casting where the actor's ethnicity/nationality is simply not considered in picking the role, making Lestrade Indian actually raises some interesting possibilities in regards to his back-story and characterization.

For starters, why is an Indian man working as a police officer in Great Britain in 1884, the year the reform bill that's a big part of the movie passed? Akhtar himself suggested that his Lestrade came from a working-class background and had to work his way up to his police position, leaving his back-story full of possibilities.

*India at the time was part of the British Empire and theoretically Indians could travel and live anywhere within its bounds--the Komogata Maru Incident I helped research as a graduate student was a legal test of that concept). Furthermore, many Indian sailors lived in port towns and even had British wives due to there being so very few Indian women in Britain. Akhtar's Lestrade could be from that background, perhaps a former sailor or a child of such, which would tie in with the working-class background. A 1931 census indicated there were thousands of Indian students in British universities, so Lestrade could be going to school part-time and paying for it by working as a police officer. Given his apparent age, this could be something he's been working at for awhile.

*Another possibility is that his presence in the UK is related to the Indian Civil Service. According to the book I used when I taught AP World History, theoretically anybody could work in the Indian Civil Service, but because examinations were held in Britain, it was extraordinarily difficult for Indians to access them. The Indian National Congress was actually founded in part to include more Indians in government--it didn't start out as a national independence movement. Lestrade's family could have paid for him to come to Great Britain to take the exams, he failed, and he's working as a police officer to pay them back. Or more optimistically, he hasn't taken the exams yet and this is how he supports himself until he does. His associations with the civil-service might explain why he is a police officer despite not being British--an Indian man applying to Scotland Yard might be rejected due concerns he might not be able to do the job effectively as a foreigner or simple straight-up racism, but an exception might be made for a civil-service candidate, either current or previous.

*Also, given how Lestrade's name is actually French, there are some other possibilities. This might be a name he adopted upon coming to Britain, indicating a desire to assimilate (especially since one study, albeit a disputed one, suggests Britons with Norman names are wealthier than those without even centuries after the conquest) or perhaps a Dark and Troubled Past he's trying to avoid. Alternatively, given how the French had a colonial presence in India before being defeated by the British, perhaps he's distantly descended from a Frenchman? Bonus points if as such he's actually Catholic, given the history of anti-Catholicism in Britain even in the 19th Century.

Although I'm almost certainly reading too much into this, if more Enola Holmes films are made (it is based on a book series) and Akhtar continues to play the role, this could be an interesting rabbit hole to go down. And if anybody wants to write a fan fiction story elaborating on this, go right ahead.

(Heck, Lestrade is public domain by now--although one wonders if a specifically Indian one is--so you could actually write a novel. Just leave out Enola completely and it probably won't be a copyright issue.)

Book Review: Sherlock Holmes and the Servants of Hell (2016)

I first became interested in the Hellraiser horror franchise when I was in middle or high school, although I lost interest for a long time. Over the last few months my interest has been rekindled--I watched the original Hellraiser for the first time and read the novel that inspired it, The Hellbound Heart. At some point along the way I saw that Rebellion Publishing had a Hellraiser/Sherlock Holmes crossover entitled Sherlock Holmes and the Servants of Hell coming out.

So how was it? Let's see...

The Plot

Sherlock Holmes, the world's greatest detective, and his physician partner John Watson are called into action when a libertine disappears from a locked room. Their investigation draws them deeper into London's underworld, where the powerful and influential cast aside their Victorian uprightness indulge in a plethora of perversions. They discover the machinations of the mysterious "Order of the Gash" and a mysterious puzzle box.

Soon Holmes and Watson find themselves faced with a foe not of this world that deals in fates worse than death...

The Good

*As I mentioned earlier I've been interested in the Hellraiser universe for a long time. Crossing it over with the realm of Sherlock Holmes is pretty creative. Someone who solves the box and is taken by the Cenobites sets up a classical "locked room mystery," especially since a philosophical materialist like Holmes is not likely to consider a supernatural cause like, well, a gang of extra-dimensional BDSM enthusiasts who drag people through portals opened by a supernatural Rubix cube.

(Wow, I just made the whole franchise seem really ridiculous, didn't I?)

*I was able to read the novel in a few hours on the elliptical and it made my exercise time go by pretty quickly. It's an absorbing read and a fairly quick one. Definitely very entertaining, which is why we all read books in the first place.

*Author Paul Kane has clearly done his research into the Hellraiser franchise. This is not really a surprise considering he'd written The Hellraiser films and Their Legacy and had the assistance of Barbie Wilde, who played the Female Cenobite in the first two films and wrote the introduction to the book. In particular he's clearly studied The Hellbound Heart, since he knows the smell of vanilla accompanies the Cenobites and those who seek their attentions sometimes offer their dove's heads and their own urine. A character is very strongly implied to be the ancestor of Clive Barker's occult detective Harry D'Amour, who appears in some of Barker's other works before facing off against the nefarious Pinhead in the recent Scarlet Gospels. The acknowledgements section at the end of the book reveals influences from anthologies of stories set in Barker's universe written by other authors as well. The climactic battle even draws on both Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 and Hellraiser 3: Hell on Earth.

*Per the above, Kane knows not to bring in Pinhead. Pinhead would have been "born" in the 20th Century and this far too early for him. However, Hell had servants well before Pinhead, so he's not really needed.

*Sherlock Holmes' deductive talents are on full display in this one. He deduces several interesting facts about one Laurence Cotton and his second wife Juliet (more on them later) upon meeting them and he's able to discern the presence of the Puzzle Guardian vagrant and just how those who've gone missing after the solving the box died. Kane has written in the Holmes universe as well, including stories in The Mammoth Book of Sherlock Holmes Abroad and Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes.

*I was initially displeased to see characters from earlier Holmes works popping up, but Kane makes the whole situation work out and paves the way for a very entertaining climax.

The Bad

*The author's knowledge of the Hellraiser universe proves to be a bit of a creative crutch when Holmes and Watson first begin investigating. The first missing person is a mischievous "Francis Cotton" and the people who seek out their help are his brother Laurence and his new wife Juliet, who live on Lodovico Street in London. Laurence has a daughter named Kirsten, with whom Juliet doesn't get along. Does this sound a bit familiar? It's the triangle of Larry, Frank, and Julia from the first Hellraiser, transplanted into the late 19th Century.

However, another missing person is one Lt. Howard Spencer and he has a son nicknamed Ellie, whom Watson thinks will go into the military for all the wrong reasons. The implication is that this is the young Elliott Spencer, who will someday solve the puzzle box in India and be transformed into Pinhead.

If the story had been a pure prequel to The Hellbound Heart, this would not have been a problem at all, and if Kane had just transplanted the tale of the Cotton family for a 19th Century reboot, I might not have liked it but I wouldn't have been that upset. However, the prequel and the reboot aspects sit uneasily side by side. And since Hellraiser is not public domain like Sherlock Holmes is, Barker and friends have to have approved this.

It would have been better if Holmes and Watson merely met the ancestors of the Cottons--perhaps they had a boarder in the upper room of their Lodovico Street house who disappeared? It might be a nice hat-tip to the mythology.

Per my point about the Cotton family reprise, some characters' fates in hell are more akin to the torments depicted in in Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 than The Hellbound Heart. For example, Barker's original novella implied those taken by the Cenobites experienced "pleasures" more physical than psychological that reduced Frank Cotton to a mutilated mess and bore at least a passing relationship to sex. The punishments of Francis Cotton, the elder Spencer, etc. are more psychological and spiritual in nature. Furthermore, they stem from the idea of the Cenobites dispensing justice upon the wicked, as opposed to Barker's original vision of them as a band of amoral experimenters in pleasure and pain. That's something that appears in the later Hellraiser films (especially the awful direct to video ones), but not in The Hellbound Heart or the original Hellraiser. The idea present in The Hellbound Heart that the damned, when not "enduring pleasure," are able to see into the worlds they've left behind is abandoned entirely.

So is this a prequel to The Hellbound Heart and some of Barker's other works, the Hellraiser film series, or both?

*Some of Watson's actions after the climax of the novel don't fit in with his character, don't fit in with the existing Hellraiser mythology and might not work with the Holmes canon overall. I'm not going to go into detail for reasons of spoilers.

The Verdict

An interesting book and a fast read besides. 8.5 out of 10.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: The Great Mouse Detective (1986)

Here's another "Blast from the Past" movie review for a movie that I have never actually seen before, but watched it as part of my friend Nick's podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood. This time, it was The Great Mouse Detective, also known as the one where Sherlock Holmes is a mouse. Here's the podcast. And now for the review.

The Plot

Basil of Baker Street, the world's greatest (mouse) detective, is called to help when Olivia, the daughter of a missing toymaker, appeals for his help. It turns out her father has been kidnapped by the villainous Professor Ratigan, who has an evil plot involving mouse version of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. Now Basil and his new friend Dr. Dawson have got to crack the case, braving human toy stores, mouse burlesque shows (I kid you not), and more to foil Ratigan's plan.

The Good

*The movie starts out with a bang, with toymaker Hiram Flaversham's abduction by the bat Fidget. The movie moves along fairly quickly and is never boring.

*Basil, Sherlock Holmes' mouse analogue, matches up with his human counterpart very well. He's got the "anti-social insufferable genius with a heart of gold" thing down. He's able to deduce all sorts of facts about various characters based on observing things most people would miss, just like Holmes.

*Although his Villain Song comes off as a bit forced in a movie with only three songs (one of which is a recording on a record), Ratigan is an entertaining villain. He's a sewer rat who pretends to be a mouse and sometimes the mask slips. The fact he's voiced by Vincent Price (yes, THE Vincent Price) is pretty cool. And he's a rat that's got a cat trained as a disposal for minions who fail him and his enemies.

*Speaking of the cat, the cat is introduced in the same vein as the Jurassic Park T-Rex, which is pretty well-done given how, to a mouse, a cat is a T-Rex.

*Fidget, who's a henchman of Ratigan, is a well-done character. He's horrifying enough to be a threat to smaller, weaker characters like Hiram and Olivia but physically small enough to be sympathetic when he's mistreated by Ratigan. And he's got some character development, like singing a song from the burlesque show to himself as he flees Basil and Dawson.

*The final confrontation between Basil and Ratigan atop Big Ben is very well-done. For starters, the whole thing is a homage to Holmes' confrontation with the villainous Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls, which is a good riff on the source material. Furthermore, I'm guessing that's where much of the animation budget went. The rotating gears are extremely impressive and are a good example of meshing early CGI with traditional hand-drawn animation. And that's when Ratigan finally unleashes his rat side on Basil, who is significantly smaller than he, and spends most of the scene absolutely destroying him.

*Flaversham is clearly supposed to be Scottish, and they give him some good dialect, including the use of the word bairn for his daughter.

*Disney used Basil Rathbone, who had played Sherlock Holmes on many occasions, to voice Holmes in a scene where he and Watson are seeing discussing something (according to TVTropes it's the case of the Red-Headed League). Rathbone died in 1967, so they had to use recorded clips. That's pretty cool.

The Bad

*Much of the animation is cheap-looking, especially at the beginning. The initial view of the city looks rather washed-out and although that might partially be due to the fog, you could have better-drawn buildings and what-not and then have the fog obscure them. The cheapness is especially blatant in the trashy mouse bar, where the background characters don't move at all (except for on occasion smoke from their cigarettes). I once interviewed former Disney animator turned rival Don Bluth for a news story and this kind of thing is why he left Disney.

*Hiram at one point rebels against Ratigan, destroys the robot he was building for him, and announces his refusal to participate in the plan. Given how he's in a room with only one door and Ratigan between him and said door, that wasn't very smart. It would've been more interesting if he had the robot attack Ratigan to allow him to escape, only for Ratigan to smash the robot (showing early on Ratigan's physical power) and knock him around some. Ratigan can then escalate his threats by threatening to kidnap Olivia like he does in the film.

The Verdict

A pretty good movie, especially for kids interested in Sherlock Holmes for whom the current television adaptations (or many older productions for that matter) might not be age appropriate due to content or attention span. It seems I'm not the only one who thinks that. 8.0 out of 10.0.