Meet Enola Holmes - Sherlock's smarter sister

 

Sherlock Holmes is in the Guinness Book of Records as the most filmed literary character in history with more than 250 of his adventures on screen and counting.

Filmmakers are also fascinated with his family, older brother Mycroft has a recurring role in the Benedict Cumberbatch series, and the lesser known Sigerson is the hero of the underrated The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Smarter Brother (1975). Now we have another Holmes sibling – sister Enola – in this lively adaptation of the Enola Holmes series from Young Adult author Nancy Springer.

Enola (Millie Bobby Brown) is the youngest of the Holmes clan and has been raised by her mother Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter). She has been raised either as an independent young woman or a wild child, depending on how you view things.

When she wakes up on her sixteenth birthday to discover that her mother has disappeared she is momentarily thrown off kilter. Older brothers Sherlock (Henry Cavill) and Mycroft (Sam Claflin) then announce they are on their way home. She is legally Mycroft’s ward and he is determined to have her raised as a young lady in a stern finishing school; Enola of course is having none of it.

There is a mystery here and if Sherlock is not interested then Enola is, and the game is very much afoot. She runs away, following her mother’s clues, and heads for London in the company of an equally young missing Marquess (Louis Partridge).

Enola Holmes is not the most challenging film you’ll come across, but it is a lively and engaging feminist romp and Millie Bobby Brown holds the attention as the heroine of the piece. Mostly this is done by breaking the fourth wall and addressing the audience directly.

Incidentally can we stop calling this a Fleabag trope. It’s not, it’s been around since Lewis Gilbert used it in Alfie (1966) and is a staple in Modern Family and The Office. If anything, as used here, it’s a Harry Bradbeer trope – the director of Enola Holmes also directed Fleabag and he did it in Killing Eve too which suggests, rather than innovative, he might be a bit limited narratively.

The supporting cast is solid, including Fiona Shaw, Frances de la Tour and Adeel Akhtar. If Louis Partridge is a bit like a pound shop Timothee Chalamet as the missing marquess, the redoubtable Burn Gorman is reliably nasty as the heavy who is out to kill him and anyone else he can find.

That said there is one glaring error in casting with Claflin being cast as Cavill’s older brother despite being three years younger. The Holmes boys in truth are not well served by Jack Thorne’s script. Mycroft, normally portrayed as a Machiavellian genius, is a pompous prig here and Sherlock is similarly poorly served. He doesn’t really need to be there, apart from marquee value, and the world’s greatest detective is made to look something of a dullard especially at the end.

In common with most Netflix films Enola Holmes is a good twenty minutes too long but there is strong franchise potential here and I’m sure we will see more of her before too long

The live-action Mulan is much more animated than the origiinal

I confess that I am not a fan of Disney’s current trend of live action remakes of animated hits. Very few of them bring anything new to the party and some of them – Beauty and the Beast (2017) leaps to mind – tarnish the memory of the original. Having said all that I have to admit that I thoroughly enjoyed Mulan as a vast improvement on the original.

The 1998 version was, literally, two-dimensional. A pale anaemic-looking film with a thin story and a heroine it was hard to feel strongly about. It felt more like a film whose origins were in the marketing department.

Niki Caro’s current version is a revelation. It’s an energetic, enthusiastic, vibrant film with a great performance at its heart. It is also one of the best looking films – even on a small screen – I have seen in a long time. It is a movie designed to make the spirits soar which is exactly what we need right now.

It is a proper, action-packed, family entertainment and would have been a much better bet to get audiences back to the cinema than the ponderous Tenet. This is a film that people would go and see more than once for sheer enjoyment and not to try to figure out what happened.

The story hasn’t really changed from the animated version, it’s just told better. The titular Mulan (Yifei Liu) is a free spirited young woman with a strong chi, or life force. She performs at almost super heroic levels of grace and athleticism, but her family warn her that ‘chi is for warriors, not for women’.

Denied her future, fate takes a hand when the Emperor (Jet Li) commands every household to send one male soldier to form a conscript army to combat the invading hordes of Bori Khan (Jason Scott Lee). He has his own chi warrior Xianniang (Li Gong) but her skills are condemned as witchcraft. As in the original Mulan steals her father’s sword and armour and journeys to join the army and meet her destiny.

This is the film’s major weakness. Mulan seems to convince everyone of her gender switch by simply not bathing frequently. Granted it’s a traditional male attribute but it takes more than a little mud on the cheeks and some killer b.o. to be convincing.

That apart Mulan the movie has two great strengths. The first is Niki Caro’s direction; the film is constantly driven forward by relentless dynamism. The action sequences are spectacular and, again, just the sort of thing audiences are craving. The second strength is the performance of Yifei Liu who anchors the film with an utterly convincing turn as a young woman who wants to be true to herself and dedicated to her family.

The casting overall is very clever with great names of Asian cinema such as Li Gong, Jet Li, Donnie Yen, Rosalind Chao, and Tzi Ma providing a thoroughly authentic feel for the story.

The real star of the film for me however is cinematographer Mandy Walker. In the past with films such as Australia (2008) and Hidden Figures (2016) she has been able to shoot glorious vistas and human stories. Here she gets the chance to do both in the same story with vibrant, sumptuous cinematography and a colour palette that pops into the imagination.

Mulan is a superb looking story, very well told. Of course, it would be nice to see it on a big screen but there is an element of snobbery in this I think. A lot of our film viewing is done on smaller screens now and, for me, Mulan doesn’t lose much in narrative or visual terms and it is to Disney’s credit that they were agile enough to make the film available as widely as possible.

 

Tenet isn't worth risking your health for

 

One of the great misquotes about filmmaking is that you should show and not tell. This is not true, the actual quote from the great Alexander Mackendrick is that films show then tell. Mackendrick’s point is that dialogue should be a commentary on action not a description.

If Christopher Nolan ever read Mackendrick’s standard text On Filmmaking, I can only assume he turned over a couple of pages at once. In Tenet, Nolan tells and tells and tells and finally shows you something you’ve long since given up on. I have never seen a film with so much pointless exposition; I assume Nolan also missed Francois Truffaut’s comment about whatever is said instead of shown being lost on the viewer. This is two and a half hours of being talked at.

Tenet is a long collection of action set pieces to no real purpose. Nolan is an excellent technical director, so the action is expertly staged but as the film goes on – and it does go on, and on, and on – there is less and less reason to care and an increasing feeling of disconnection.

Given the length of time we waited for this film, if this is genuinely the saviour of cinema then we are in bigger trouble than I thought.

At this stage I would normally recap the plot but, if I’m honest, I don’t think I could if my life depended on it. It’s about temporal manipulation, parallel timestreams, and a magic word that seems to always work but we don’t really know because they only use it the once. There is also a lot of stuff about Freeports which should please Rishi Sunak.

One of the narrative conceits is that time flows in different directions, forwards and backwards, but I’m afraid that watching the movie it felt like time stood still.

I’m not a fan of the opinionated Will Self but I cherish his description of Nolan’s Inception (2010) which he described as a stupid person’s idea of a clever film. I feel that way about a lot of Nolan’s work, but especially Tenet.

Nolan always needs to remind you how clever he is. He made a film based on papers from Nobel-prize winning astrophysicist Kip Thorne after all. That’s why in Tenet superspy sidekick Robert Pattinson has a Masters degree that allows his dialogue to sound like he’s rehearsing a TED talk.

And yes, it is all a bit meta on narrative structure. That’s why the protagonist is called The Protagonist (John David Washington) and never stops telling people he’s the protagonist. There is even a scientist who, in the first piece of major dialogue, just dumps all the information on the audience they didn’t know they needed or indeed wanted.

Despite all this mumbo jumbo there is no getting away from the fact that Tenet is just horcruxes with added techie porn. The alleged cleverness is always so glaringly obvious, even in the nature of the title.

The film is at its best in the action sequences, there is undoubtedly a Bond film in Nolan desperate to get out. The set pieces may be overblown but they are easy on the eye and the lack of any emotional attachment to anyone means they can be watched with a certain detachment. Generally, you can feel impressed by their execution without having to engage emotionally. That said, the only moment where I did engage was in a simple fight in a hotel kitchen which might be the best action scene in the film.

Robert Pattinson is probably the best thing in the film. John David Washington is a bit of a charisma vacuum, befitting a character with no personality. The normally watchable Elizabeth Debicki is saddled with unspeakable dialogue and, as the villain, Kenneth Branagh continues his mission to make it increasingly difficult to believe he was ever considered the best of his generation.

All the craft choices seem odd too. Nolan’s favourite DoP Hoyte van Hoytema shoots most of the film in close ups so not only are people yelling at you they are doing it into your face. Happily, the sound mix in a non-IMAX version is so muddy you can’t make out what they are saying.

There was so much invested in Tenet it is intriguing to consider what it means for movies in a post-COVID world. This is a film with a budget of more than $200 million which means it needs to take in around $400 million to be in profit. Plainly it will not do that in socially-distanced cinemas. However, it was supposed to stimulate interest to get us back to the movies and I struggle to see it doing that.

Unlike, for example, The Sixth Sense (1999) there is no compulsion to see it again to spot how you were fooled. Tenet is one and done and I can’t imagine the buzz lasting much beyond that lifebelt for a drowning man scenario of the opening week or two.

Tenet ultimately is a mystery box without a mystery. Since I’m in a quotey mood, let’s end with another. Monroe Stahr, the hero of Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, was, we are told, one of ‘not half a dozen men who could keep the whole equation of pictures in his head’. I suspect even Stahr would have struggled to know what was going on in Tenet.