Review: Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again

Jukebox musicals – you know, where they string together a bunch of popular songs then wrap a paper-thin story around them – make sense on stage: they’re basically a live concert with talking bits. As a movie though, they need a little extra to get them over the line. The first Mamma Mia had star power in the form of Meryl Streep and a bunch of name brand handsome guys; with Streep out the door and all the good ABBA songs used in the first film, why exactly are we coming to the cinemas for this one?

It’s been ten years since Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) first asked her mother Donna (Meryl Streep) about her three dads (Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgard) and got a whole bunch of ABBA songs as a reply. Now her mother is dead – presumably from cancer of the StreepDidntWantToReturn – and in tribute Sophie is about to open a hotel on the Greek island she called home. Then there’s a storm and nobody can make the launch. Then everybody shows up anyway in what looks like that extremely camp remake of Dunkirk we’ve all been clamouring for.

Look, this is not a movie you’re watching for the story, despite extensive flashbacks explaining exactly how young Donna (Lily James) slept with three separate hot guys within a month (basically, it was the 70s). And for a while it’s hard to know exactly why we should be watching: young Donna’s adventures only occasionally spark up (despite Lily James going flat out selling every moment), while Donna’s mysterious death hangs over the early scenes like an unspoken deadly death cloud of death.

That’s not the only mystery here. Why is the Greek bar Donna first sings in owned by Aquaman? Why is it assumed that having Donna singing about a female teacher makes “When I Kissed the Teacher” less creepy? Why does Sophie think turning a farmhouse into a hotel on a tiny Greek island requires a staff in the dozens? What’s the deal with the white goat? And why does Sophie’s New York husband Sky (Dominic Cooper) break up with her by talking into what is clearly a light switch panel he tore off the wall?

(Actually, the goat is probably a relation of The Witch’s satanic Black Phillip; the only way to explain the mountains of food served up at the hotel launch is that the goat offered Sophie the chance to “live deliciously”.)

But at some point around the halfway mark it all somehow clicks into place: the jokes get funnier, the musical numbers get sillier, and if it never quite hits the deliriously demented heights of the first film it does at least manage to relax into an agreeably bizarre groove.

At one stage someone says ‘Jesus Christ, what kind of island is this”, and this is before Cher shows up in a helicopter to sing "Fernando" to Andy Garcia's robot double (not to be confused with Skarsgard's fat-suit wearing double, which is a thing that actually happens), let alone when Meryl Streep’s ghost turns up to sing one final number before trapping the living cast inside a church she then (I assume) burns to the ground on White Phillip’s orders so everyone can perform the final dance number in Hell.

So yeah, it all works out in the end.

- Anthony Morris

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