Does an Enola Holmes movie have to be two hours and ten minutes long? Can’t it just be a 100-minute snackable delight? Surely that’s enough time for us to appreciate all the different charming facial expressions Millie Bobby Brown is increasingly capable of making.

This was about the length of the original Enola Holmes from 2020, which was seven minutes shorter despite having to build its entire world from the ground up. By the time a sequel comes around and everything we learned from the first movie is revisited through a briskly edited 30-second montage, we should just be able to focus on a tight little mystery that moves just as briskly.

Enola Holmes 2 is not that. The Netflix-style excessive length (this being a product of Netflix after all) draws attention to how much narrative filler there is when we’re not watching Brown’s face. She’s on screen for most of the movie, so there’s a lot of face watching, but this film’s writer (Jack Thorne) and director (Harry Bradbeer), both reprising from the original, confuse our interest in their charismatic star with a genuine interest in unravelling the mystery. The dirty little secret about whodunnits is that most of us care more about the stars, the witty repartee and the production design than who actually did it – and that stuff all fits quite nicely into 100 minutes.

Enola is of course the younger sister of Sherlock Holmes (Henry Cavill), hence all the focus on evidence and fingerprints and who might have framed whom. (She’s also the younger sister of Mycroft Holmes, but he’s been jettisoned after the first movie – maybe because the character was a bit superfluous, or maybe because Sam Claflin has become more and more of a disagreeable screen presence.) Having gotten her feet wet as a detective in the first movie, she’s now opened an agency, but is consistently doubted because people don’t expect such abilities from a woman – and of course because the shadow cast by her older brother is long.

This time around she gets involved in a case of women and girls dying at a match factory, an epidemic that is blamed on typhus. But it turns out they changed the materials used to make the match heads about two years ago, which is about when the girls on the factory floor began dying, and the new white phosphorous they’re using is toxic. Now there are people dying for a different reason, which is that they’re being silenced for what they may know about how much the factory owners are culpable for this – and how much they knew what was happening and ignored it. The elder Holmes has his own case tracking his old rival Moriarty – whose identity shall not be revealed in this review – and it looks as though the two mysteries may be converging.

There’s nothing wrong with the story Enola Holmes 2 chooses to focus on, especially since it allows the movie to make a stab at social relevance. The deaths of the girls at the match factory was actually a thing that happened in London in 1888, when a real strike from match factory workers was led by a real woman named Sarah Chapman (played here by Hannah Dodd). Neither is there really anything wrong with the scheduling of reveals related to the narrative, and the energy it has from moment to moment. A lot of the credit for that energy goes to Brown, who has already received her share of praise in this review.

Lingering elements from the previous movie, though, inevitably sidetrack the momentum, even with the Mycroft Holmes character left out of the story. One of these is Enola’s explosives expert “terrorist” mum, played by Helena Bonham Carter, who has to come back in for an otherwise irrelevant ten-minute scene, mostly as what I suppose you would call fan service – if it’s not too early in the Enola Holmes series for such a concept to exist. Another returning character is Enola’s love interest, Lord Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge), and even though they work him into the story well enough, it’s a reminder of how busy the movie can feel.

One does have to marvel, though, at Netflix’s success at building what is undeniably a popular franchise. Not only has viewership of Enola Holmes 2 been huge in its first week, but general interest in the series has significantly boosted viewings of the original. Surely much of that is the ever-growing popularity of the star of another gigantic Netflix hit, Stranger Things, who should continue making delightful facial expressions for years to come.

However, they’ve really done the work on these movies, with an opulent production design that spares no expense, and a star of Cavill’s stature along as second banana – no small ask for the guy who plays Superman. Enola Holmes 3 is a virtual lock, and Netflix still has plenty of material among the eight books in Nancy Springer’s Enola Holmes series, two of which have been published since the first movie.

 

Enola Holmes 2 is currently streaming on Netflix.