Review of Mary Poppins Returns (2018) by Hnestlyonthesly — 07 Oct 2019

As far as I can tell, Mary Poppins Returns is the story of an upper class family that has fallen onto temporarily hard times yet can still afford a full-time nanny and a housekeeper. After her first chore of giving the three appropriately woke children baths, it’s easy to see why the myth of Mary Poppins is the wet dream of dads everywhere and a very big **** you to all moms. Emily Blunt does a lovely job being mean and contrary whenever possible, even spinning some dark moments into her performance at the end of “The Place Where Lost Things Go” and the look into the red balloon mirror during “Nowhere to Go But Up,” as she says, “practically perfect,” either referring to herself or the family she is about to leave.

My favorite songs are the one for adults, done in perfect burlesque fashion, “A Cover is Not the Book,” and “Turning Turtle,” because one of the actors sings the entire thing in an amazing Eastern European accent.

Wife called the film “soulless,” “a robot movie that looked the way a movie is supposed to look but with nothing underneath,” I think, because she thought that it was over-long, lacked essential truths like “A Spoonful of Sugar,” and felt like an only “loosely collected assortment of songs”. Mom said it felt like “watching a K-Drama” in the way its ending abruptly arrived. Wife says by making the stakes so high, the writers kind of ensured that the film would work out, because we knew deep down that no one was going to make those kids sleep in the street.

I said that I thought the bit in the beginning when, in an homage to the original, the kids and Mary Poppins are transported into a cartoon world would either mark the film as visually audacious or send it straight to the made-for-television category of children’s films and my dad said, “It looked exactly like it had been made in the original.” “Better?” I asked. “The same,” he said, which feels like it’s probably not a good thing.

These people wanted to see Mary Poppins in the first place, but they were so turned off by the sheer volume of half-baked songs and the uncanny valley of rudderless morality that is Disney’s sequel machine that they were coaxed into mild annoyance. My feeling is that your kids probably won’t know any better, so if you’re into it, go see it, but if you’d rather see literally anything else, they won’t be able to tell the difference anyway.