Philip Barantini's Enola Holmes 3 is absolutely, incredibly bad. Its target audience seems to be second-screen ADHD viewers who cannot sit in silence for even a second. No wonder the movie sprints as though it were running a 100-meter dash. The breathless exposition is less concerned with coherence than with keeping the audience's attention. Enola Holmes 3 never stops to ask, "Did you get all that?" It simply throws lines and images at you in quick succession to make you believe that you are watching something dynamic, gripping, and electrifying. It tries to convince you that you are seated for a thriller and are having a good time. The movie is in a mad rush because it doesn't want you to figure out that you are on a journey that's thoroughly suspenseless and unremarkable. You need only be a reasonably attentive viewer—not Sherlock Holmes—to discern that Enola Holmes 3 is a fruitless, forgettable exercise. It's empty calories; it lacks even superficial enticements.
"A good story begins with a wedding," remarks Enola (Millie Bobby Brown) early in the film. By the end, she says that a good story, in fact, ends with a wedding. Barantini and writer Jack Thorne spend all 105 minutes proving their titular character wrong. They might as well be commenting, "Enola Holmes? She is not that perceptive in matters of literature and storytelling." What's more, by concocting a slapdash mystery, the filmmakers (unintentionally, obviously) comment on their own lack of perceptiveness when it comes to storytelling. Who cares if Enola is getting married? The conversations around the loss of independence and submitting to the rules of society are inserted like half-baked, surface-level embellishments that never go very far. They merely hit pause on the obvious to fill up the movie's runtime. You never doubt that Enola will leave Lord Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge) or that she won't go through with the wedding. And the mystery involving Sherlock's (Henry Cavill) kidnapping isn't absorbing enough to distract us from the blandness of this sequel, destined to be abandoned and left to rot in Netflix's ever-growing content pile. Enola may find her happy ending, but the audience is left dissatisfied. Enola Holmes 3 is a waste of everybody's time.
Final Score - [1/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
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Publisher at Midgard Times