Review of Mary Poppins Returns (2018) by James R — 14 Jan 2019

About what I expected. Don't get me wrong this wasn't a bad movie, but it was lacking in a few places and I found the run time to be horrendous. This is a direct sequel to Mary Poppins (1964) and is set roughly 25 years after the events of the first film.

Michael (Ben Whishaw) and Jane Banks (Emily Mortimor) are now grown up. Michael has three children Anabel (Pixie Davis), John (Nathanael Saleh) and Georgie (Joel Dawson). Michael lives with his three kids and Ellen (Julie Waters) their maid (who was also in the first film, but of course played by a different actress).

Michael's wife passed away and since then he's turned away from making art and is now working as a teller. Jane is working toward bettering low income workers (much like her mother was helping out all the time in the first film).

One day the bank comes by and tells Michael he's missed out on three months worth of payment for their house, so unless he can get the entire loan paid off in 5 days, or find proof of them owning shares of the bank.

..they will lose their house! Distraught from all of this in comes Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt). Mary arrives just in time to get the Banks children old and new back into shape and to help them realize whats most important.

The children have grown up too quick and need a reminder on how to have fun and some other important life lessons. Along for the ride as well is a lamplighter worker named Jack (Lin-Manuel Miranda) who has a connection in a ways to the family.

First the good. There are some very catchy songs to this one and even now I am humming them a bit. Are they as catchy or legendary as "Let's Fly a Kite" from the first film? No not really, but I overall enjoyed them.

I really enjoyed Emily Blunt's performance. She jumped into the source material more and supposedly her version of Mary Poppins is much closer to the version that the books entail. She has a charm to her and really fits the roll well.

I had no issue with her taking over from the great performance that Julie Andrews did in the original film. I still have two big gripes here. First off the movie runs much too long. I know its a musical, but man clocking in at 2 hours and 10 minutes is a bit of a stretch here for me (especially when it has a pretty simple plot).

I found a lot of the scenes were rehashes from the original film (there's an animated section, a section where the lamplighters sing, a section where Mary's teaching a good manner or cleaning song, etc).

There were 3 scenes in particular I thought could have been cut completely from the film and would have helped the pacing of the film (visiting Mary's cousin, the lamplighters songs and the balloon song at the end) all three of these went on way too long and don't even add much to the story (outside of the balloon song).

I enjoy musicals and director Rob Marshall has made some really solid one's that I like including Chicago (2002) & Into The Woods (2014), but for this one I think he stretched it out a bit too far.

I would have loved to see more background on Mary, but I get it that she's suppose to be mysterious and all. My only other gripe is the plot here is incredibly predictable and I just found myself kind of wondering when the movie would end about an hour in (much to my surprise I wasn't even half way done).

It's very by the book and for the most part it just doesn't capture the charm of the former. It's close don't get me wrong, but this one would be a stretch for me to watch again because of the length of it and the fact that overall I didn't have as much fun with it as I thought I would have.

If you're a mega fan of the original I would say check it out if you aren't I would say wait to rent it!