Mary Poppins Returns

2018 belated sequel

Rating: 15/20 (Buster: 18/20)

Plot: Mary Poppins returns.

I love Disney's character posters like the one above. Angela Lansbury is in the movie for maybe five minutes. She's about as essential to the movie as the bird woman in the first Mary Poppins, but there is is on her own poster.

One of most anticipated movies of last year, Mary Poppins Returns finally arrived. Unfortunately, I need to see it again as I ended up in a situation where I had to watch it in the very front row of a theater. As much as I've fantasized about being really close to Mary Poppins, it just wasn't much fun having the screen a few feet from my face. It's also not the idea situation for a person with a neck.

This is a lot like The Force Awakens which I think means we can expect a darker, more subversive sequel that will irritate a lot of Mary Poppins fanboys. Like that first movie in the new Star Wars trilogy, this gives people exactly what they want, almost to a point where you want to roll your eyes. It's almost a Poppins greatest hits, and in fact, I think if you put the two movies on top of one another, scenes would even match up. Mary Poppins would descend from a cloudy sky at around the same time. Clean-up times would occur at the same time. Characters would leap into a cartoon world and even dance with penguins at the same time. Meryl Streep's scene--boy, she's doing whimsical exactly like you'd expect her to do it--where they visit a friend and experience a ceiling happens around the same time as the Uncle Albert "I Love to Laugh" scene in the original. The movie doesn't have chimney sweeps, but it does have lamplighters, and they get an acrobatic and mesmerizing subterranean dance sequence at roughly the same time as that thrilling root top choreography. And at the end, kites are replaced with something else in a scene that is not quite kites but might as well be. And then, Mary Poppins returns to wherever she came from, and the audience thanks Disney that this isn't an origin story, that the mystery of Poppins is intact.

But you know what? It's all done well enough that the near-plagiarism doesn't annoy. Actually, a sequel that comes 54 years after the original should be expected to be a little something like this, hitting all those nostalgic beats a little too perfectly. This justifies its existence by having a real drive. There are stakes for the characters--Michael and Jane, who haven't aged 54 years, and the former's children--and just like there's a need for Mary Poppins in their world, you feel like there might be a need for another Mary Poppins movie in ours.

Emily Blunt's Poppins doesn't quite have the sex appeal of the Julie Andrews' Poppins. Maybe it was because I was irritated about being too close to the screen, but my bOner with a capital O didn't poppins once. I thought Lin-Manuel Miranda was really good as Bert. I mean, Jack. Jack's the Bert of this movie. He has a nice little song that bookends the films. It isn't quite "Chim Chim Cheree," but it's about as close as a song could be. The songs are at the very least serviceable. I can't remember a stinker among them, but I also can't be sure I'll remember any of them. Of course, I haven't heard them as many times as the songs in the original. I do like the score in between the song-and-dance numbers, a lot of it recalling songs from 54 years ago. I like Ben Whishaw here much more than I liked the kid who played Michael in the original, and there's a real emotional weight to the character that he and his mustache pull off. That character is really given some heartbreaking moments in this thing.

Dick Van Dyke deserves his own paragraph. I knew he was in this and even predicted exactly what his character would end up doing in this movie, but I kind of expected him to limp out like the nonagenarian that he is and not do a whole lot. But he does something in this that almost made me stand up in my seat and give a whoop, and I probably would have if i hadn't been in the front row and in danger of getting a concussion by hitting my head on the screen. I can't wait to see his scene again because I was a little distracted wondering if CGI legs were involved or something. That's the biggest smile I've had on my face in a really long time.