Review: Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again

Newly pregnant Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) is about to open a hotel named in honour of her late mother Donna (Meryl Streep). We spend most of the film flashing back to young Donna (Lily James) meeting the three men who will serve as parental figures to her eventual daughter Sophie. Andy Garcia plays a Greek hotel manager. The first film was a perfectly sunny, cheerful love letter to ABBA, and really only faltered when Pierce Brosnan decided to dis-grace us with his (lack of a) singing voice.

This 2018 sequel from writer-director Ol Parker (a former “Grange Hill” writer who also wrote “Imagine Me & You”) features unconvincing good cheer, Cher, third-tier ABBA songs, and ugh…Pierce is back. They really ought to have gone the “Spaceballs” route and subtitled this one “The Search for More Money”, because this is pretty desperate and empty. As was the case last time the Greek island setting is absolutely gorgeous, Amanda Seyfried has quite a lovely singing voice and Lily James is once again OK as a young Meryl Streep, whilst new addition Andy Garcia is very easy to take.

Then there’s everything else.

For all the attempted good cheer here, the story and its structure are actually pretty much the polar opposite. The combination of cheery ABBA songs and everyone coming together in remembrance of a dead person doesn’t come off. It feels rather heavy. I applaud the writer-director for not just rehashing the exact same plot, but it still ends up playing like a lesser version of the first film anyway, with the quality of the songs just making the difference even more obvious. After 35 minutes the whole thing just stops dead, really. Lily James is a perfectly tolerable actress, but her character and flashback scenes (that form the bulk of the film) are tedious. Seyfried is lovely, but her part of the story is morose.

So you’re pretty much left with just the songs, and as I’ve said, they’re mostly the third-tier ones with the occasional repeat of the classics thrown in. The best of the also-rans is 1981’s ‘One of Us’, with Seyfried and Dominic Cooper doing a fairly OK job of it. The young version of Colin Firth merely shows that only Colin Firth can get away with being boring, polite, and English. Seriously, he’s the only one it ever works for. Anyway, young Colin Firth (i.e. Harry Skinner) does a version of ‘Waterloo’ and I was seriously not having it. It’s a disaster, with Skinner unable to sing and unwilling to very much try. It’s the Pierce Brosnan approach of ‘I don’t want to be here doing this yet I willingly signed on and oh look, money!’. I’m also not a huge fan of ‘Waterloo’ to begin with, as it’s a good Eurovision song but an average ABBA song (I love both, but ABBA is normally of a higher class than the Eurovision Song Contest). And yet, I will say that everyone else in the scene looks to be having a ball, a genuine, full-hearted ball and it still ends up being kind of sweet if you can block ‘ol Half-hearted Harry out. As for Mr. Brosnan, he does have a sort-of singing bit with ‘S.O.S.’ (one of ABBA’s best-ever songs), but thankfully barely raises his voice above a moderate whisper so as not to offend your eardrums. English actor Josh Dylan looks absolutely bizarre as the young version of Stellan Skarsgaard and never quite settles on an accent. He’s also even more boring than Skinner. He’s still more convincing than Jeremy Irvine who is meant to be the young Pierce Brosnan but boy is he not even the same species. This is our main plotline, Lily James’ character encountering the three important men in her life, and all three of them are boring and unconvincing. James does have a lovely singing voice which is put to quite good use, I’ll admit for the fairly decent ‘Name of the Game’ (probably the second-best of the lesser tunes here). She and Not-Pierce-Brosnan (Irvine) also do a good job on ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’. The problem? It’s my least favourite of their well-known songs. Seriously can’t stand that song. As for Mr. Skarsgaard, I don’t know if donning a fat suit in a bizarre and unnecessary scene to play his character’s brother is meant to be funny, but it’s not funny. At all. He’s really poorly used in the film, actually. Meanwhile, are we honestly expected to believe that Cher gave birth to Meryl Streep? ‘Coz that’s absurd for several reasons, one being that Cher is only 3 years older than Streep! Cher herself looks quite absurd in this, her lips are the only things moving on her face. Cher’s the one who gets to sing ‘Fernando’, and admittedly she’s a good choice for it. The cynic in me notes that Cher also released an album of ABBA covers in recent times, more cash-grabbing. Andy Garcia joins her for the song but can’t sing and barely tries to be audible. Wise strategy.

Just listen to your ABBA collection instead. Here you’ll have about an eighth  of the fun that the cast appear to be having, and even some of their cheer seems a tad forced. Pretty lousy attempt at a cash-grab here.

Rating: C