Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
“Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again” is like a second greatest hits album from a band that didn’t have a lot of hits to begin with. Of course, they’ll sprinkle a few of their biggest hits around so that their die-hards can justify buying it, but the cuts on the album are largely second-tier, and would only be familiar to people who already owned all of the songs to begin with. Oh, and they’ll have a brand new song on there, for good measure. There’s seriously no better way to describe Ol Parker’s sequel to the 2008 box-office hit.
When I finally watched “Mamma Mia!” a few years back with my wife, it was agreeable. Didn’t love it, didn’t hate it. I thought it went about its business well enough, and it did what a good musical should do. This one is superfluous and unnecessary in every way, shape and form. The choreography is fine and it’s staged decently, but this film does not bring any greater insight to the story that was already told in the original, and that’s a big problem if you’re trying to do a sequel years after the fact. Yes, we get to see when Donna meets all of her daughter Sophie’s “dads” when she is making her away to the Grecian island after high school, and when she sleeps with each one, but I didn’t feel like that was necessary after the original film, and, regardless how much the script tries to make it so, it doesn’t illuminate anything about the situation Sophie is in as she tries to finally realize her mother’s dream of turning this run-down building into a hotel one year after Donna died. Wait, what? Oh yeah, but don’t worry, Meryl Streep shows up for what was probably a costly cameo to the producers for one, final mother-daughter duet to ram the film’s point down our throats.
If “Here We Go Again” has one shining light, and something I can handily recommend seeing it for, it is the luminous performance by Lily James (from “Cinderella” and “Baby Driver”) as young Donna. Amanda Seyfried is lovely reprising the role of Sophie, and the rest of the returning actors (Christine Baranski and Julie Walters as Donna’s lifelong friends, and Colin Firth, Pierce Brosnan and Stellan Skarsgard as the dads) are fine, but James is a pure delight, and really embodies the spirit of Donna, this force of nature that inspires all these people in her life. Yes, Cher cameos in the end as Donna’s mother, and she is a living icon, but she’s not a character, and she isn’t given anything to do but be Cher. If James engaged me so much, why am I so low on the film? It feels as though this one is trying to be more about Sophie becoming the woman her mother wanted her to be, and that’s just surface here, and having flashbacks (unprompted by the events in the present day material) to her mother’s story just makes this more about Donna. I kind of enjoyed the “Godfather Part II”-inspired story structure, but the film jumps from one song to another so quickly throughout the beginning of the film, it feels unsure of what the story it’s trying to be (and it doesn’t help that the story feels justified, at times, by what songs they had to choose from for the sequel). That’s where the “greatest hits” compilation comparison at the beginning comes into play.
If you enjoyed the first one, I can see this hitting you similarly. But it’s funny; when I was in the movie last night with my wife, nobody really seemed to get into the movie on the whole, reacting to songs or laughs that the film tried to land. And yet, they still applauded at the end. Okay? I don’t really get that myself. I’m not the movie’s audience, though. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t entertain me on some level, though.
