Mamma Mia! It’s another cracker
How could you resist this barnstorming Abba sequel? Don’t even try, says our man in the front row pretending not to sniffle
Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again Cert: PG 1hr 54mins
Weighed down by the shock of unexpected death, the distinct possibility of divorce and the lightweight likes of Amanda Seyfried and Lily James warbling their way through some of Abba’s lesserknown numbers, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again gets off to such a sad, minor-key start that it takes almost an hour to get itself back on tuneful track again.
‘The history book on the shelf is always repeating itself,’ Benny and Björn once wrote, but even after a ten-year wait and with the great Richard Curtis of Love Actually and Notting Hill fame guiding the storyline, all this jumping backwards and forwards in time was not what I – a huge fan of the original – was expecting. The structural die was cast, however, and this would be that rare cinematic thing: a film that is both prequel and sequel at the same time.
So as we recover from the shock that one of the key members of Donna and the Dynamos is no longer with us and watch Sophie (Seyfried) struggle to reopen the Hotel Bella Donna on the Greek island of Kalokairi (played perfectly well by the Croatian island of Vis this time around), we go back to 1979. It’s here we discover how Donna, Tanya and Rosie first got together (at Oxford) and, more importantly, how sweet, smiley, cheesecloth-skirt-wearing Donna managed to have unsafe sex with three different manboys in what seems like less than a week. Rather sweetly, as it turns out, but, come on, this is a Richard Curtis story – it was always going to be rather sweetly, wasn’t it?
But as we repeatedly jump back and forth, problems begin to emerge amid all the youthful fun. In the lengthy flashbacks, huge responsibility falls on the slender shoulders of Lily James, who plays the younger Donna (Meryl Streep’s role), while in the ‘present’, the action has to be largely carried by the unlikely combination of Seyfried, the weakest member of the original cast, and Pierce Brosnan. Oh, and there’s handsome Andy García playing a charming but broken-hearted Mexican hotel manager. What’s the betting his first name turns out to be Fernando, I wonder?
But just when there’s a real danger of the whole thing settling into a pretty, tuneful but emotionally uninvolving mediocrity, Tanya (played by the wonderful Christine Baranski) and Rosie (Julie Walters) turn up to belt their way through a showstopping version of Angel Eyes, and suddenly the whole thing roars back into glorious, summer-enhancing, Abba-loving life. At last it’s the film we’ve all been waiting for, and from that moment on Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again doesn’t put a platform-boot-wearing foot wrong. Hugh Skinner (best known as the hapless intern from TV’s W1A) is very funny as the younger version of Colin Firth’s character, and his Parisian brasserie-set version of Waterloo provides one of the comic highlights. On the allimportant female side, Jessica Keenan Wynn and Alexa Davies are beautifully cast as younger versions of the characters played by Baranski and Walters. Lily James, of course, is a star already, and rightly so, even if she does look more like a young Jessica Lange here than a young Streep.
But it’s the old guard who carry a film (I almost wanted to cheer when Firth and Stellan Skarsgård came on) that, while it enjoys looking back at the follies of youth,
is at its regret-filled best when examining lives lived, opportunities missed and loves lost. And every now and then, found again too. There are some truly glorious moments as we head into the final lap. A Mediterranean armada, of possibly the best choreographed disco boats ever, provides a wonderful excuse to revisit the big harbourside set-piece of the original, while late cameo appearances by two huge stars are an emotioncharged joy.
If Cher’s version of Fernando doesn’t get you, then what happens next definitely will, as the story finally turns full circle. A barnstorming, disco finale provides the perfect excuse for the producers to get their money’s worth from Cher (worth every dollar) and for us to cheer Mamma Mia! 2 to the rafters and pretend we’re not still gently dabbing at our eyes.