There’s a scene in Enola Holmes 3 that I’ve watched nine or 10 times just to make sure I hadn’t somehow missed something. Enola is fighting her nemesis, Moriarty, and the villain throws a noose around her neck and quickly starts to tighten it. The very next cut shows Enola having somehow escaped the noose and now getting it around Moriarty, with no indication of how this could have possibly happened. One second, it’s on Enola, the next, the tables have turned.
It's a shockingly bad bit of editing in a movie that is watchable enough, in the broad sense, but that fails at some basic bits of filmmaking in ways it’s hard to get your head around. We’ve all heard the talk that Netflix is pressuring filmmakers to make their movies with the idea that people will be distracted with other things while watching them, but this is pretty extreme, and we have to wonder what went wrong here.
If you don’t remember, Enola Holmes is the younger sister of the great Sherlock Holmes, and she’s a master detective in her own right. I reviewed both of the first two films in this series positively, noting that they were light, airy fun, with flaws that were plenty easy to overlook. Not so this third film, which finds Enola on the island of Malta, preparing to marry her sweetheart, Tewkesbury, when Sherlock goes missing and suddenly mysteries abound. There are fun touches, as when we’re transported to new locations and the scene falls into place from the sky, Millie Bobby Brown continues to charm as Enola, and Helena Bonham Carter steals every scene she’s in as Enola and Sherlock’s mother.
But you’d be hard-pressed to say exactly what’s going on at any particular time—again and again, characters are interrupted in the middle of what they’re saying by someone new entering the room and completely changing the situation. More than one person is shot right as Enola is about to get important information. The editing, especially during action scenes, is so erratic that it’s distracting. And even if Moriarty is our main antagonist, she’s essentially relegated to tooth-gnashing and making mean faces rather than doing anything especially devious.
It's hard to know exactly who to blame here. The movie’s directed by Philip Barantini and written by Jack Thorne, the two men responsible for the Netflix series Adolescence. That show won just about every award a show can win, so we have to figure they have some idea of what they’re doing, even if this is a very different kind of production. But whatever the reason, we can’t escape that it’s simply poor filmmaking, and why it was released in this condition is a mystery even Enola might not be able to solve.
Enola Holmes 3 is on Netflix.
