Take a chance on the super troupers
My! My! The Abba-loving extroverts from Mamma Mia are back... and they’re just the tonic we need right now
Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (PG)
HERE We Go Again is the perfect title for this keenly awaited sequel to Mamma Mia!, the 2008 hit inspired by the music of Abba.
Not only does it neatly adapt one of the Swedish supergroup’s most familiar lyrics, it also sums up both ways of anticipating the new movie.
There are millions who adored the first film now crying ‘Here We Go Again’ as an expression of breathless excitement, as they skip merrily to the nearest multiplex.
But the same words can also be muttered in a spirit of eyerolling cynicism, by those who thought the original shallow and silly, and regard the sequel as little more than a licence to print money, money, money.
Well, let the cynics stand down. With the delightful Lily James and the indomitable Cher joining those super troupers Meryl Streep, Julie Walters, Colin Firth and Pierce Brosnan, Mamma Mia 2, as I think we can call it, is an absolute blast and just the injection of joyful exuberance that we need right now.
Admittedly, Brosnan still hasn’t learned how to carry a tune. Not very far, anyway.
And the plot is still less meaty than a vegetarian moussaka, and almost as pointless.
But I was at the world premiere in London and can report that the crowd wore a huge collective grin from start to finish. And the same thing happened at the Irish premiere in Dublin the following night where the audience was singing along. Even without the infectious exhilaration of a premiere, it is bound to play to happy audiences.
The story begins a few years after the events chronicled in the first film, still on the Greek island of Kalokairi, in reality the Sporades island Skopelos, where Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) and her husband Sky (Dominic Cooper) have hit a rocky patch. She wants to devote her life to the hotel she is opening in honour of her late mother Donna (Meryl Streep). He is in New York on business and keen to live there. But never mind that; this is not a film to dwell on marital disharmony. Nor does it linger for any longer than it has to on Donna’s apparent recent demise. After all, the Grim Reaper has no place in the sun-kissed, love-addled-world of Mamma Mia, except as a reluctant plot device.
Soon we are whisked back to 1979, with James, beguilingly, and with a lovely singing voice, playing the youthful version of Donna. I wasn’t sure about the big opening number, the lesserknown Abba song When I Kissed The Teacher, erupting at a Oxford graduation ceremony like a cow out of a matchbox, so implausible and unconvincing does it seem even by Mamma Mia standards. But the film soon finds its gloriously jaunty rhythm, and even if you’ve spent the past ten years not giving a Greek fig why exactly Sophie wasn’t sure of her paternity — a toss-up between Sam (Brosnan), Harry (Firth) and Bill (Stellan Skarsgard) — or indeed how Donna ended up on a Greek island in the first place, and formed the Dynamos singing group with her two best friends, you might be surprised how pleasurable it is finding out.
The action keeps skipping back and forth in time, between Sophie’s plans for a lavish opening night party, attended of course by surviving Dynamos Rosie and Tanya (Julie Walters and Christine Baranski), and events a generation earlier.
Alexa Davies, in particular, is marvellously funny as the younger incarnation of Rosie.
In fact, all the younger versions are notably well cast. Jessica Keenan Wynn is a great