Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again Review

It's been an interesting week for me as I journeyed into the world of "Mamma Mia!" for the very first time. I'm very well aware of the success of the original stage musical, which opened in 1999, then made its debut on Broadway in 2001 and ran through 2015. That run is the ninth longest run in Broadway history. It's still currently running at West End in London, which is where it actually premiered in 1999 and is the seventh longest running show in West End history. So yeah, it's quite the big deal. I've never seen the stage production of "Mamma Mia!" even though I'm sure it's fantastic. In fact, I've never gotten too deeply invested into theater productions in general, so there's a lot of those that I haven't seen, but we can discuss the reasons for that another time. It's not due to a lack of enjoyment, though, when I do go. As pertaining to the cinematic adaptation of "Mamma Mia!" in 2008, I never got around to watching that because I heard it wasn't a good adaptation due to the lack of musical talent from the cast among other things. But then a sequel was announced for this year and I knew that I would eventually have to bite the bullet and get this franchise out of the way. Last week I noticed that "Mamma Mia!" was on Netflix, so I dove in and began my journey.

I feel like it's very important for you to understand my opinion of the first "Mamma Mia!" before we dive into this sequel that I just saw, so allow me to describe to you my utter shock when I begrudgingly pressed play on my tablet, kinda put it aside and distractingly watched as I updated the box office numbers on my Excel chart. Again, I wasn't expecting to enjoy this movie, but I felt it necessary to educate myself before I see the sequel, which had started to get plenty of buzz. Yet in a strange turn of events, I found myself super invested in this silly little musical to the point where I actually started paying attention to the movie more than my Excel charts. It was silly and cheesy, but I found myself getting super invested into the plot itself. Amanda Seyfried is getting married and she wants to figure out who her real dad is, so in reading her mom's journals, she realizes there are three potential options, so she invites all three of them because she's sure that the second she lays eyes on them, she'll immediately be able to know who her real dad is. But when Pierce Brosnan, Bill Skarksgard and Collin Firth all show up, she has no idea who her real dad is and suddenly begins to panic as she realizes she has created quite the mess that leads to an emotional and funny romcom.

And, of course, in the midst of this genuinely enjoyable plot, we get loaded with the songs from ABBA, an extremely lovable Swedish pop group. Admittedly I can't call myself a genuine ABBA fan because I haven't explored their discography too much, but from a young age I have always loved the song "Dancing Queen." As a teenage boy it was more of a guilty pleasure because I saw it as more of a girly song and teenage boys aren't supposed to like girly songs. But now I will unashamedly blast that song because it's an extremely enjoyable pop song. Now said ABBA songs are where the bulk of the controversy surrounding the movie musical comes in. If you have a Broadway cast of trained singers who can do justice to ABBA's music, adding that along with a fun, creative plot must be why the stage version is so beloved. But the movie chose to cast non-singers to sing the songs in the movie and thus they become guilty of this underlying issue with movie musicals. Do you cast professionally trained singers so that the music sounds good or do you cast famous actors in order to draw in crowds to see the movie? "Mamma Mia!" chose the latter and thus the music itself is quite lacking, but I managed to mostly overlook that due to how good the story was.

Which brings us to the sequel. The biggest question here is... why? There's not a sequel to the stage musical. In fact, most movie musicals don't even get sequels, so why is "Mamma Mia!" leading the charge by throwing together a second one? Without even knowing much about it earlier this year, this just sounded like a dumb idea that was thrown together simply because musicals are a big thing in Hollywood thanks to the huge success of movies like "Les Mis," "Into the Woods," "La La Land" and last year's "The Greatest Showman." I was annoyed at the fact that it seemed like they were just cashing in on a trend rather than creating content that they felt needed to be shared. After seeing "Mamma Mia!" I was even more confused because there's no more story to tell in the universe of this movie. Without spoiling anything, "Mamma Mia!" wraps up quite beautifully. I was ready with my torch and pitchfork to burn this thing to the ground, which is something I'm not afraid to do when it comes to movie musicals. I'm not just going to ignorantly jam out because I'm in a movie theater and catchy music is playing. I demand quality. Yet adding to my confusion is that the same critics that trashed the original movie were praising this sequel.

Perhaps saying the critics were praising the movie is a bit deceiving. Sure, the Rotten Tomatoes score is significantly higher at now 79 percent compared to the original's 54 percent, but what some people don't fully realize is that there's actually an average rating that goes along with that. The Tomatometer is just the percentage of people who gave the movie a pass. A 79 percent doesn't mean a 7.9 average rating. It just means that 79 percent of critics gave the movie a pass, even if it's just barely. In fact, if a movie gets a 100 percent score, that doesn't mean that every critic is praising it as a masterpiece. You could have 100 percent of critics say a movie is simply OK and that would still get the 100 percent score. Thus with "Here We Go Again," while the score is 79 percent, the average rating is just 6.3 compared to the original's average rating of 5.5. That makes me feel a little bit better because "Here We Go Again" is not a good movie. Due to the positive reviews, I ended up going in with a sense of curiosity because maybe this was going to be another fun musical like the first. But no, it turns out that my original concerns about this movie were realized. This movie is nothing but a cash grab and has nothing to add to the original when it comes to plot.

Said plot is the biggest problem, so let's jump right to it. I liked the original because of the plot. And I fully imagine that the plot in the original is good because it is based on a popular play that is built in with an already enjoyable plot. So when they decided that they wanted to cash in on the growing trend of movie musicals by creating a sequel, I can imagine that there was much contention in initial meetings involving the screenplay that never fully got resolved because there's no way that the final result was a stroke of revelation that everyone agreed on. Due to the fact that they had to start from scratch this time around instead of simply adapting a popular source material, I feel like there was a lot of discussion pertaining what to due and it feels like they just settled. The original movie's plot involved a lot of mystery and intrigue involving who Amanda Seyfried's real father was which resulted in a hilariously messy web of relationships that managed to perfectly fall in place at the end. This sequel's plot is two-fold and half of that is literally a complete retread from the first movie, which I found extremely disappointing. The other half is actually quite boring and lifeless, so when there's literally no plot to grab onto, I'm left with the music to entertain me.

The two plot arcs are as follows. The plot that I said is a complete retread is where we dive into the past in order to show what happened with Amanda Seyfried's mother and her three lovers. In these flashbacks, the mother is played by Lily James. I knew that we were going to have flashbacks to the past, but I assumed that since we were going to do so that we were going to learn new information about the mother the the first movie didn't tell us. I kept waiting for this new information to be revealed, but it never came. So essentially this sequel spends half the movie, if not more actually, showing us the exact same story that the first movie spent about five minutes or less discussing. Her mother had three quick flings with three different guys, none of which worked out for different reasons. That's all we needed to know and the first movie did just fine explaining that, so I'm really confused as to why the sequel felt the need to spend half of the movie showing us what we already knew while revealing nothing new outside a few small details as to why her mother decided to settle in Greece. Lily James owns this role as she's one of my favorite current actresses, but it's a shame that her talents were wasted on such an insignificant part of the story.

The other half of the movie is Amanda Seyfried reopening her mother's hotel. That's actually kinda it. The drama doesn't come in a messy, fun, tangled web of romance and self-discovery. The drama comes in guessing who is going to attend this opening. Because that's exactly what I was hoping for out of my "Mamma Mia!" sequel. A cast reunion where I have to guess which cast members are going to show up. Are we going to see all three of Amanda Seyfried's dads, Pierce Brosnon, Bill Skarsgard and Collin Firth, or just one or two of them? Is her new husband/boyfriend thing played by Dominic Cooper going to come back or is he going to stay in New York? Is her super famous grandmother going to show up or remain a non-aspect of her life? I mean, talk about drama! Now, someone who doesn't really show up in this movie is her present-day mother, played by Meryl Streep. I'm actually not sure of her non-presence in the movie is common knowledge, so I won't reveal why she's mostly not in this movie. But there is a small side arc between the two of them that the movie could've focused on that would've made for something decently interesting, but it's just that. A side arc. Almost like Meryl Streep didn't have time for this movie, so they quickly came up with something.

That's our movie. Retelling the mother's backstory for half of the movie and waiting to see who shows up to the hotel reopening for the other half of the movie. Thus with no plot, we are left to rely solely on the music for our entertainment, which happened to be the weakest element of the original. Not the songs themselves. ABBA is great. I've been listening to the original recording of "Dancing Queen" on repeat while typing this review. But the performance of the songs aren't that great. I love the living heck out of Lily James, but her singing feels about on par with Emma Watson's singing in "Beauty and the Beast." Yet 10 of the movie's 18 songs on the Apple Music soundtrack are from Lily James. Amanda Seyfried gets a few songs and she's serviceable, but not excellent. The best performance probably comes from Cher, unsurprisingly, because she's the only actual singer in this movie. Some of the choreography in the scenes are pretty good, but the times that I was entertained the most come from the songs that were also in the original movie, like "Dancing Queen" and "Mamma Mia," but were done better in the first movie. And they weren't that great in the first movie. Am I going to listen to this soundtrack? Of course! But the original ABBA songs. Not these covers.

I will admit that the movie has it's moments and that's because it has a fantastic cast of actors who are all extremely talented when it comes to acting. When they are acting and interacting in the movie, the movie is certainly tolerable and inoffensive. There's no moments in the movie that are outright awful and I didn't walk out of the theater hating life. I've learned recently that some of the most passionate fans out there are fans of musicals. If there's a musical that they love and you don't, they'll metaphorically drag you out of your house and crucify you. Some of the most intense debates I've had on this blog where I felt the most brutally attacked are a couple of musicals that I happened to not enjoy. I'm not going to bring those up, but you know exactly what I'm talking about if you've been around long enough. I'll just say that there's reasons those musicals made me upset and said reasons are absent from this "Mamma Mia!" sequel that make this the better movie musical. If you still want to hate me for not being impressed with "Here We Go Again," then fine. Whatever. Just know that I enjoyed the first movie. This sequel just didn't do it for me and I'm surprised by how many critics have given this one a pass. My grade for "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again" is a 6/10.