Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again expands the ABBA Cinematic Universe. Not everyone is happy
When you think about it, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again has a lot in common with a Golden Retriever. The American Kennel Club calls the Golden an “outgoing, trustworthy, eager-to please family dog.” If you’ve ever met a golden retriever, you know that their personality mixes that of a squirrel with Sonny the Cuckoo Bird when he goes coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs. The Kennel Club ends its profile describing the Golden’s “joyous and playful approach to life” and their penchant for retrieving waterfowl for hours on end.
OK. Only part of that applies to the Mamma Mia! sequel.1 But the film takes that part and stretches it to its absolute limit. Nobody walks into an ABBA jukebox musical expecting a great film. But everyone who buys a ticket expects to be entertained. In that sense, the original Mamma Mia! and Here We Go Again check the right boxes. Both are essentially two-hour joy bombs banking on their soundtrack and smiling-so-hard-it-hurts attitude to carry otherwise below average filmmaking. The former applied the formula to a story about family and love and old flames, featuring Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan2 strutting in glitzy disco garb.
Was it awful, or was it a ton of fun? That depends on who you ask. The original Mamma Mia! raked in $600 million and has garnered a cult following since its 2008 release, despite a healthy amount of critical derision.
Ten years later, Here We Go Again has continued the ABBA Cinematic Universe with a healthy Rotten Tomatoes score (80 percent at the time of this writing). And while there is a general consensus that the new film tops the original, there are plenty of detractors. “Those who hated Mamma Mia may become dangerously unstable if forced to sit through the sequel,” writes Reelviews’ James Berardinelli.
The thing is, it’s not even that bad. The film is both a sequel and a prequel3, cutting between Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) and a young version of her mother, Donna (Lily James). In the present timeline, Donna has passed away and Sophie is busy organizing a grand re-opening of her Greek island hotel. Her marriage to Sky (Dominic Cooper) is in long-distance jeopardy. Two of her three dads — Harry (Colin Firth) and Bill (Stellan Skarsgård) — can’t make the opening. The third, Sam (Brosnan), lives on the island but is struggling with Donna’s death. Even worse: a storm threatens to derail the whole affair.
Read more Split Tooth Media movie reviews here
Meanwhile, young Donna graduates from Oxford — in a sequence choreographed to “When I Kissed the Teacher” — and travels the world to find her calling. She runs into young Harry (Hugh Skinner), young Bill (Josh Dylan) and young Sam (Jeremy Irvine) and we find out exactly how the whole “But who’s the father?” business came to be. Eventually she lands in Greece, where she finds the farmhouse that will later become her hotel.
For a film treated like a bastion of fun, Here We Go Again deals with pretty heavy themes. Donna’s absence pervades every scene, and there are plenty of emotional moments to balance out the corny musical sequences.
you ever look at a headline and just know the article was written by a straight dude who doesn’t know how to have fun https://t.co/1qcERJ4Lye
— mamma mia jolie-pitt (@MIACINO) July 19, 2018
On paper, that sounds like a tonal nightmare. But director Ol Parker and producer Richard Curtis manage, somehow, to keep it all together with decent success. The film’s final moments are genuinely moving and touch on parenthood, time and what it means to grow older.
Of course, if you find the film’s forced optimism or bad singing grating, it’s all very easy to hate. Remember that 80 percent Tomatoes score? Well, that 20 percent really, really didn’t like this movie. “Call this embarrassing dog’s dinner Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again or just call 911,” writes Rex Reed for The New York Observer. Stephen Witty, at New York Daily News: “It’s a movie that has nowhere to go and takes forever to get there.”4
My personal favorite hot take comes from Peter Travers at Rolling Stone. “Like Trump voters,” he writes, “fans of this jukebox-musical franchise see only the good in it, despite irrefutable evidence to the contrary.” That’s a little extreme.5 Regardless, the critical reaction was polarizing enough to ruffle some feathers on Twitter, and eventually opinions got sorted into two philosophical categories.
You’re not cool or edgy for not liking Mamma Mia, you just have bad taste in film
— Lys (@lanasoutlaw) July 26, 2018
On one side: the Mamma Mia stans, lovers of fun, who don’t need an Oscar season durge to have a good time at the movies. On the other side: the haters with sticks up their asses who don’t know how to relax and have a good time. Leave it to The Onion’s satirical film critic (and national treasure) Peter Rosenthal for the best take on that debacle:
“[It’s] a film you can choose to enjoy for the perfectly fine piece of entertainment it is, or live out the rest of your existence as a miserable killjoy, who slogs through life recoiling at anything remotely joyful or upbeat in the world. Your choice.”
Truthfully, the love-hate divide makes having a lukewarm opinion feel oddly pretentious, like a shrug in a controversial art exhibit. (Who knew a musical of ABBA B-sides could be such an online lightning rod?) But the unavoidable truth is that it is an average film, kind of good and kind of bad. It’s fun and flawed, and that’s OK.
Maybe you’ll love Cher walking down a flight of stairs belting “Fernando” to a man literally named Fernando. I won’t disagree (or call you a Trump voter), but I might roll my eyes a little.
Follow Dana on Twitter
Feature image courtesy of Universal Pictures
(Split Tooth may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
- The part about being joyous and playful.
- When Brosnan made Die Another Day, I didn’t realize he was talking about his career.
- Srequel?
- New Yorkers hate ABBA, I guess.
- Ya think?
