Here we go again! Mamma Mia 2 – worth all the hype
Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again PG cert, 114 min Dir Ol Parker Starring Lily James, Amanda Seyfried, Pierce Brosnan, Christine Baranski, Julie Walters, Jessica Keenan Wynn, Alexa Davies, Jeremy Irvine, Hugh Skinner, Josh Dylan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgård, Andy Garcia, Cher, Meryl Streep
In April 1917, Marcel Duchamp laid a porcelain urinal on its back, signed its rim with a fake name in a simpleton’s scrawl, then submitted it to New York’s Society of Independent Artists under the title Fountain. The board was scandalised, and refused to display it.
As a critic I regret not having been around for the scramble to make sense of Duchamp’s work, which seemed to violate every conceivable standard of merit in Western art. But at least I was here for Mamma Mia!. Even a decade on, it still seems so extraordinary: Colin Firth warily circling
Our Last Summer, Pierce Brosnan garrotting SOS, that Generation Game choreography, Meryl Streep in dungarees – and also the 29-week theatrical run, the attendant Abba revival, the impromptu cinema singalongs, the Titanic-toppling £69.17million box-office take. By any objective measure, Mamma Mia! was bad. But it also worked, on its own insane, Dadaist-karaoke-package-tour terms. And God help me, I loved it. So 10 years later, along comes a return trip to Greece for another escapist wallow in the Abba songbook, in the form of this combined sequel and prequel. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again lacks the shock value of the original. But, as before, the music is a hoot, in both track selection and execution – execution occasionally being the operative word. To see Firth and Stellan Skarsgård sing, “You can dance, you can jive” at each other while shimmying down a jetty is to witness the rare spectacle of a song refuting itself. But daftness like this is why they – and we – are here, and Here We Go Again is consistently funny, always amiably at its own expense. The plot channelsurfs from past to present and back, covering the latest goings-on at Streep’s Grecian B&B, while also filling in the original’s raunchy backstory. That was the “our last summer” of yore that left a big, glittery question mark over the paternity of daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried). In the presentday strand, Streep’s Donna has, tragically, passed away – though even death can’t stop her from singing Super Trouper as a ghost. Sophie has refurbished her hotel in her mother’s memory, and has arranged a grand reopening for which the original cast, including Dominic Cooper, Christine Baranski and Julie Walters, will be melodiously reunited.
Back in the past, we see young Donna (Lily James, with the Streepian swagger down pat) arriving in Greece for the first time, where she is romanced by Jeremy Irvine, Josh Dylan and Hugh Skinner as fresherfaced versions of Brosnan, Skarsgård and Firth. Also tagging along are her uni sidekicks Tanya (Jessica Keenan Wynn) and Rosie (Alexa Davies), who do an uncanny job of replicating the Baranski-walters double act. In fact, the casting is eerily accurate.
The opening number, When I Kissed The Teacher, is strained and feels out of place in a film whose soul is more OK! Magazine than Tatler – but once things get under way, it is a smooth, silly, relentlessly uplifting run to the big party finale, with its much-trailed cameo by Cher as Sophie’s grandmother.
There is certainly something in the air that night: possibly vaporised Prozac. I left the cinema with a spring in my step that could have taken me to Skopelos in a single leap.