Writer: David Magee (Screenplay) David Magee, Rob Marshall & John DeLuca (Story)

Director: Rob Marshall

As a child and teenager I detested musicals. They could reduce me to a scything rage, like Tommy Robinson being forced to have a pint with a non-binary vegan. As a child I just found them utterly bizarre; why were these people always singing and why did they never talk about it afterwards? I was very much your typical sneering, ‘indie’ teenager, which meant I had a phobic reaction to a single whiff of sentimentality. And if there is one thing that seems to define musicals; it’s a sometimes wonderful, often mawkish sentiment.

Sadly, Mary Poppins Returns has not cured me of my ‘Cue Song’ aversion. The sequel to Disney’s 1964 perennial TV classic Mary Poppins takes place roughly 25 years after the original. Jane (Emily Mortimer) and Michael (Ben Wishaw) are adults living in 1930’s London, Michael still residing in the original house with his three children, Annabel, John and Georgie. Simply put, the plot of the film is Michael is five days away from having his house repossessed by Colin Firth’s villain banker William Wilkins. The Banks family is inevitably dysfunctional and down on their luck, mostly due to the death of Wishaw’s wife and the children’s Mother. This leads, by the way of a magic kite, to the return of Emily Blunt’s Mary Poppins.

Blunt is in no sense playing Julie Andrews playing Mary Poppins, which is the only way taking on such an iconic character can work. And she does make it work, she charms as the brisk but deeply caring Poppins, and given her accent, was presumably raised by BBC schedule announcers. This is a very RP film; it’s very much a classic take on England, all ‘sir’, ‘ma’am’, and ‘veddy good’. But Blunt shines in a role that is difficult to pull off, even without the need to sidestep Andrew’s shadow. Like all great children’s heroes, Blunt’s Poppins radiates with hope. She is magical and leads the children on glorious adventures, but she gives them the space to solve their own problems.

Aside from Julie Walter’s decent comic turn as housemaid Ellen, Hamilton creates Lin-Manuel Miranda is the only other major character not sounding like Radio 4 turned sentient. And, unfortunately, he is by far the most intensely annoying character in the film. His accent is appalling, a hacky ol’ chimney sweep cockney that itches the skin from the outset. He opens the show with the worst song in the film, ‘(Underneath the) Lovely London Sky’, which sounds like Ray Winstone ‘Live at the Palladium’. He already knows that Mary Poppins is magical, so he spends the whole film in an almost bored relaxation, no matter how fantastical the adventures get. On the whole though, the acting in Mary Poppins Returns is pretty good. Emily Mortimer as worker’s rights activist Jane Banks is excellent, and Ben Wishaw is great in a very much to type casting as a grieving, emotionally damaged man. Kobna Holdbrook-Smith is genuinely hilarious as a little too nice lawyer, Mr Fyre. And Colin Firth is, well, Colin Firth.

Director Rob Marshall has a showbiz but fairly neutral style and manages to create some excellent set-pieces, especially the ones that blend animation and live-action. The scene in which the children, Poppins and Jack go inside an illustrated bowl has a lovely, hand-drawn Saturday cartoon feel to the it. This sequence in particular feels both comfortingly classic and cutting-edge, which is surely what Marshall was aiming for. John Myhre’s production design is excellent; the streets of 30’s London are vivid and lush, with very bold colours. The city feels like a confection tin come to life, with the right amount of sheen and sweetness.

However, the film is several metres short of greatness. The songs, written by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, are fairly innocuous and have none of the lasting earworm magic of the original. There is also a huge number of them, surely one every ten minutes, which feels like too much. Dave Magee’s script clips along as it should, hitting every emotional beat you imagine from the film’s starting off point of Jane and Michael searching desperately for a certificate that proves they own some of the bank that is demanding loan repayment. There is no getting away from the film’s saccharine nature and the chance to explore some interesting ideas about how the Great Depression affected the lives of the middle-class in London are lost beneath age-old, superficial resolutions.

It cannot be argued though that the film is not a success. I mean it literally is in terms of box-office but more in the sense that it’s an immensely difficult thing to pull off, make a sequel to arguably the most popular family film of all time. Nobody hates it, most people are actually filled with joy by it, and given they could easily have cried ‘HERESEY’, that counts as a huge win. However, whether Mary Poppins Returns will last the ages like the original remains to be seen. I no longer view musicals with teenage enmity; some of them are excellent, but this Poppins is too close to the centre to garner my real enthusiasm.

6/10