I saw Enola Holmes last weekend, and saw 6 Underground the week before. One I can’t recommend, and the other I’d recommend to nearly everyone.

First, 6 Underground was a very pretty mess. I haven’t looked up who was in charge of writing (Paul Wernick & Rhett Reese?), edits, effects, or anything else past Michael Bay’s role as director, but somewhere along the line a great deal of the movie fell apart. If you want a simplistic portrayal of regime change a la Batman, with minimally developed characters and frequent holes in the story—and the world’s continuity in general—then 6 Underground is for you. As per usual, Bay is extremely good at finding beautiful camera angles and showcasing big action sequences… but he mostly ignores the other stuff that movies are made of.

Sometimes I fear I hallucinated my enjoyment of Bay’s Pain & Gain, and worry that I should re-watch it to see whether it’s still worth holding up as a counter-argument to my usual dislike of Bay’s movies. I haven’t gone back to it yet. It’s hard to muster my enthusiasm, when I’ve just watched something else by Bay.

Thankfully, Enola Holmes (eponymously named for the main character) was delightful.

I like middle grade and young adult fiction. If you’ve followed anything else here for a while, I doubt that will be a surprise. Enola Holmes feels like an excellent translation of Upper Middle Grade / Young Adult storytelling into movie form, and I would love to see a sequel (which I understand is in the works, lawsuits from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate notwithstanding). Relatedly, I now want to read the book series this movie was based on, the first book of which is The Case of the Missing Marquess by Nancy Springer.

A few choice tidbits in no real order… I’m a fan of the movie’s little historical nods, especially including suffragists (later called suffragettes) who really did learn jiujitsu in order to take on cops who tried to break up their demonstrations. The movie’s (and I assume, the book series’) extrapolation of the Holmes family’s dynamic is excellent fun, and I loved seeing the growth of Sherlock (in the background) in response to Enola’s prodding—heck, any time Millie Bobbie Brown and Henry Cavill were on screen together was fun. Honestly, putting Helena Bonham Carter, Millie Bobbie Brown, and Henry Cavill together in a movie is a pretty strong lure for me. I also can’t overstate how glad I am for a period piece like this to include the women’s suffrage movement, and to draw the traditional male protagonists’ attention to it without making those protagonists the focus of the story.

If you enjoy Sherlock Holmes stories or Middle Grade / Young Adult narratives, and don’t mind some fourth-wall breaking commentary from the main character, I strongly recommend Enola Holmes.