Mary Poppins Returns

And so everyone, we're at the last movie I've seen in 2018, Mary Poppins Returns. This is a movie I was sorta curious in seeing, especially with it being a sequel to one of the biggest Disney properties of all time. Plus, it's a Disney movie, of course I was gonna want to see it. I actually sorta had some thoughts on what I thought the movie was gonna be like and as I started looking at some of the early reviews, they were pretty much saying exactly what I was thinking. But I still wanted to see it to see what they could bring to it. And... yeah, this was really underwhelming. It was pretty much doing exactly what I thought it was gonna do. That's not to say this is an awful movie. There are some things I liked and some things that I thought were going in a good direction, but it also has a lot of problems. Also, I'm just going to go with all the spoilers from the beginning. This has been out for a while and it's easier for me to talk about it. Let's go over the story first. What's the story? It's set 20 years after the first movie and now a Lamplighter named Jack, played by Lin-Manuel Miranda, is on the streets of London while Michael Banks, played by Ben Whishaw, has three kids named Annabel, John and George. His wife died a year ago and now Jane, played by Emily Mortimer is trying to help him with paying off a loan that the bank is telling him about, but the bank manager, played by Colin Firth, is actually after the house and is trying to sabotage them so they can't pay off the loan or have it in time for the deadline. And that's my main problem with the movie that I'll get into in a minute. Mary Poppins, played this time by Emily Blunt, notices this and when George begins to fly their old kite from the first movie, she grabs it and comes down from the sky to help them again. And I'm gonna stop there. So, yeah, that may have been the basics of the story, but, there's more to it than that and it's a huge problem. First though, the positives, what's the good stuff? The cast isn't that bad. Emily Blunt is a pretty good replacement. She's obviously not as good as Julie Andrews, but no one can be as good as her in this role. But, if I had to pick a replacement for her years later, yeah, Emily Blunt does a pretty good job. Lin-Manuel Miranda might be my favourite part of the movie as Jack. He's obviously just supposed to be this movie's version of Bert, but I thought he did great and I liked his character. Jane and Michael's characters feel like they've really matured since the first movie and the performances are really good. And the rest range from pretty good to just fine. The effects also, they're fine. They're certainly not ground-breaking like the first movie, but they're fine and there are some creative uses of it. And there's some other nice scenes in here and the directing by Rob Marshall's pretty good. However, with that, there's a lot of this movie has obvious problems. The most obvious is that everything in this is exactly like the first movie. You can watch this movie and point out what they're doing all over again because it's just a rehash of the first movie. They have characters do things that're just like the first and even if it's not exactly like the first, they'll do it in a way that's very familiar. So, there's that part that already makes this movie not great. Another is that this movie has a villain and a climax at the end. That's something I really didn't like. The Mary Poppins series, I feel, doesn't need a villain in this or a climax. The first movie didn't have a villain and that's something that made that exceptional because it didn't need one. Also, there's parts of this movie, especially towards the end, that really don't make sense. Like I said they have a climax with them trying to rewind the clock on Big Ben so they can make it in time and Jack is trying to make it inside but it's dangerous for him, so when he eventually make it inside and turns it back a little and then Mary just flies up and turns the hand on the clock. Why didn't she just do that at the start? That was kinda weird. And there's a ton of other plot holes that don't make sense. There isn't many problems after those ones, but those problems are still pretty big. Overall, I can't say this is a good movie. I can't say it's a bad one either, but it has a lot of things wrong with what they were trying to do. If you're interested, that's fine. It is entertaining, but if you were ever looking for a truly amazing follow-up to one of the biggest Disney properties of all time, you're not really gonna get that here. I didn't hate it, I just didn't see the point of it existing when it was done and it does feel like it's trying to recapture the magic of the first movie, but it does it way too much. But, again, if you're interested, I would recommended. Like I said, it's not a bad movie, it's just really rehashed which makes it really distracting. And so, everyone, that's my review of Mary Poppins Returns. Thank you all for reading and please comment down below to tell me what you think.