Enola Holmes 3: Malta Is More Than a Backdrop
Enola Holmes 3 raises the subject of colonization for the first time in the franchise and then spends the whole movie avoiding it. This is what happens when a movie wants credit for “going political” without doing any of the actual work.
A Freedom Fighter With No Fight
Mizzi is the first colonized character in Enola Holmes 3, a franchise that has spent two movies pretending the British Empire was just a nice backdrop for solving mysteries. However, he is portrayed more as comic relief than as a person who actually wants liberation. He’s charming. He’s likable. He’s fun to watch. What he isn’t is someone the story allows to genuinely fight for his country.
We never see what colonization cost him. The story doesn’t show his suffering. It doesn’t show his endurance. It doesn’t show his plan for freedom. Instead, he gets stuck helping find Sherlock Holmes rather than leading an independence campaign. The story only lets him state his agenda. It never lets that agenda become action. A cause you mention once isn’t a cause you’re fighting for.
As a result, the film’s critique of colonization reads as nostalgia, not substance. It brings up the idea of empire just to look timely, not to actually sit with it.
Redemption for the Colonizer, Nothing for the Colonized
Here’s where the movie really shows its hand. Tewkesbury renounces his title and expresses disappointment in his father’s actions. The brigadier, his godfather, accepts imprisonment. The movie treats both as though justice has been served.
It hasn’t. None of this gives the imprisoned Maltese soldiers their years back. None of it undoes what Maltese people lived through under colonial rule. Instead, the movie turns colonization into an emotional arc that asks us to sympathize with the colonizers for doing essentially nothing for the colonized.
Then the film closes on a marriage and a celebration with fireworks. There is nothing about Malta’s freedom or its people’s future. The movie gets to raise the subject of empire and then walk away before answering for it.
A Postcard, Not a Homeland
Even the way Malta looks on screen tells you what the film actually cares about. Malta is framed as an exotic island of cliffs and coastline, ideal for a destination wedding. The visuals’ warm, yellow-orange tint is classic Hollywood shorthand for “third world” locations. It’s a very old trick: turn a place into scenery rather than somewhere people actually live, with an actual history.
The camera lingers extensively on Malta’s landscape for the wedding, the aesthetics, and the vibe. However, it fails to capture the people who inhabit it and the years of colonization they endured. And that’s the tell. Before Mizzi shows up, colonization isn’t even a thought in this movie. It isn’t woven into the world. It is imported for one character’s arc and dropped once he has served his narrative purpose.
Enola Holmes 3 wants credit for noticing that colonization exists. That’s not the same as reckoning with it. If a franchise is going to bring up empire, it owes its audience more than a subplot and a wedding. Representation is a commitment to the story you actually tell, not just the addition of a character.