Kung Fu Cooking Girls 

Netflix’s recent Millie Bobby Brown vehicle, Enola Holmes 3, is a disappointing and confusing entry in the stellar Enola Holmes franchise. Directed by Philip Barantini, the film stars Brown as Enola Holmes(estranged sister of Sherlock Holmes,) Henry Cavill as Sherlock Holmes, and Louis Partridge as her love interest, Viscount Tewkesbury. While it deserves credit for its exciting action scenes and attempts to expand the diversity of its Dickensian setting, the most recent entry in the series completely scuttles Enola’s underdog status from the first films that made her so charming and gave a touch of realism to the story of a young, unmarried woman living in London while self-employed as a detective.

Enola Holmes 3 opens with Enola on her way to her wedding to the Viscount of Tewkesbury. A dramatic scene ensues in which Enola must rip off her wedding accouterments and attack the man pursuing her carriage, who turns out to be Dr. Watson (Himesh Patel) asking for help because Sherlock has been kidnapped. In a flurry of flashbacks and narration to the camera, we follow Enola as she abandons her wedding, the hotel she’s staying at gets burned down, and her soon to be mother in law is kidnapped. With help from her mother (Helena Bonham-Carter), her pushover fiancé, the amenable Dr. Watson, and anticolonial Maltese freedom fighter (and comic relief) Mikiel Mizzi (Joe Azzopardi), she saves her loved ones and uncovers a conspiracy of silence around treasure plundered from Khost during the British invasion of Afghanistan. However, Enola’s character has changed dramatically since the first two films, and in some ways lost its effectiveness. 

Many have been asking if director Fernando Coimbra’s 2017 war drama Sand Castle pushes for drama at the expense of realism. Writer Chris Roessner based this film off of his experience as an Iraq veteran, but how much did he add to the story to embellish it to fit the big screen?

Roessner said himself that the film is based on his experience, but it is not totally autobiographical. Roessner came from a military family and when he was accepted into his dream film school, he soon realized he wasn’t able to afford tuition so the military seemed like the best solution. If he served a few years in the military, he could get the education benefits offered for serving the country and attend his dream school. The main character in Sand Castle, Ocre(Nicholas Hoult), has this same back story.

Roessner’s goal was to portray what war was to him, dirty and violent, and the film did just that, but many other Iraq veterans argue the story falls flat of being realistic based on their experiences. So perhaps Roessner portrayed just his truth of war, and who then can tell him he’s wrong?

The debate of realism aside, the film itself is regrettably forgettable. War dramas are a vast genre and after some time the majority of them blend together. My fiancé enjoys war dramas (or action filled war stories in general) so I tend to tag along when he puts one on, but after a while I forget how many we've watched and what plot points belong to which movie. They’re all so similar. While Roessner tried to develop a film from the point of view of a different kind of character (young, empathetic, and naive rather than trained, strong, and unapologetic), the action and the plot get lost among the masses.