Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is a TV special pretending to be a summer tentpole movie. I get it, ladies. You want a girl power movie to battle the swinging dicks of summer. Good for you. You got Universal to scrape the bottom of the well that ran dry in 2008. But, you got your way. Live with the movie that Comcast farted out for you. At least, Lily James overachieves in every frame of this film.
Let’s get things out of the way. Meryl Streep is dead, but she also shows up in the latest Mamma Mia installment. Handle that with the usual pomp that I expect from the Internet. Amanda Seyfried is trying to move on roughly a year after her death. The Hotel and the Island has been revitalized, while Seyfried takes a moment for a big life changes. She’s pregnant and wants to make sense of what brought her mom to the island. So, she invites back her dead mom’s three bang bros and they try to restage the past. Did I mention that Lily James is the only thing that works in the movie?
You’re going to see many reviews and everyone is going to be floored by Lily James. She’s Michelle Pfeiffer in Grease 2. There’s not a terrible desire to connect her to the main film, but she exists to tell a tale of female independence by her own terms. Following stunning turns in Baby Driver and Cinderella, James is rapidly becoming one of my favorite actresses. It’s just why get associated with this movie? In terms of everyone else, well they show up.
Baranski, Waters, Brosnan, Firth and Skarsgard do their best with what they’re given. But, this is Donna traveling around the Grecian islands getting her fuck on. When, it’s not…it’s Seyfried getting upstaged by granny Cher getting her fuck on with Andy Garcia. Amanda Seyfriend almost functions as the perfect avatar for the listless and sexless Millennial generation worrying about their crushing reality rather than taking care of basic human desires.
Cher does get to sing and really old cougar seduce the young men in the film. Don’t do the math on how Cher is Meryl Streep’s mother. It won’t even make sense in the Ozarks. Just promise to watch the kids, your lover’s dogs or just hang out in the toilet while your significant other goes to check out this movie. I hear the local theater still has an arcade. No one is going to fault you, if you step out of the auditorium to play Hydro Thunder or Pinball for 2 hours. No one would fault you at all.
[…] romantic comedy as a summer release isn’t new. Hell, Lily James starred in the rather awful Mamma Mia sequel last summer. It’s just that most romantic comedy and movies like that tend to perform better […]