Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again - My Review

I love ABBA, but hate musicals. 

Not only does this mean I scored 50% on Buzzfeed’s notorious, and in my opinion reductive, ‘How gay are you?’ quiz, but it means I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to see ‘Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again’. 

However, realising I could write a snide review, hopefully receive a few ‘likes’ from non-family members and thus harvest some dopamine for the coming winter months, I went for it. 

£15 it cost me. £15.

Now, just a quick disclaimer: it’s very hard to come off well reviewing a film like Here We Go Again. You don’t want to be one of those joyless pricks who hates it, but you also don’t want to be one of those smug, artsy culture critics who gives it four stars then goes home to have a wank about how he isn’t a snob. I’m aiming for a third option where I end up reviewing society as a whole but then brilliantly link it back to the film with a clever metaphor, because I did a sociology degree and feel like I need to justify the £34,000 of debt.

So, what goes on in this year’s all-singing, all-dancing, all-white summer blockbuster? (It is genuinely all-white, apart from, I think, a line-less black waiter. I’m not sure I’m the person to properly discuss racial representation in musicals, but I am confident enough to declare that this ‘seems bad’.) 

Basically, despite having two plots - one set in 1979, the other in the present day - nothing actually happens. There’s more jeopardy in eating a packet of Revels than there is in the entire first hour and ten of Here We Go Again, and the only suspense occurs when it rains a bit and Pierce Brosnan has to try and move some plates beneath a gazebo (he manages it). 

This happens a lot.

Due to there being no tension whatsoever, the singalong moments are spectacularly unearned, emerging from nowhere like a flash mob in a gastroenteritis treatment advert from 2010. And here the film encounters its dilemma: can a big musical set-piece make you feel good if none of the characters have overcome anything to achieve it? To be honest, because the songs are so great and there’s no graphic of a tiny gorilla climbing into a stomach and putting out a fire with a hose, your brain sort of goes along with it. 

Multiple times I started feeling good, which instantly made me feel bad. I was just so angry with my brain for being impressed by all the colours and the sounds and the symmetrical faces. Pathetic. I went to Cambridge. I shouldn’t be enjoying films that don’t have subtitles. And I certainly shouldn’t be enjoying films that don’t have subtext. But fucking hell, there I was, enjoying it, my brain feeding me endorphins against my will as I scrabbled around trying to find something to be snarky about. 

And it’s not even like the set-pieces are well-done. None of the men can sing, everyone’s auto-tuned, and the songs become further and further removed from what’s happening on-screen until it’s some sort of twisted in-joke. The penultimate set-piece, for instance, involves Cher snogging a Spanish hotel manager called Fernando to the song ‘Fernando’, which in the words of ABBA’s Björn is about ‘two old and scarred revolutionaries in Mexico sitting outside at night talking about old memories’. 

 

She looks like the dragon from Shrek IMO.

Yet, still, these atrocities made me smile. It seems the human body has evolved to respond to certain stimuli whether it likes it or not – in this case chord progressions. You wonder why films bother with a plot when in reality we’re just bin bags of DNA that react to anything that might vaguely help us have sex or not die, which apparently includes the music of ABBA. (That said, I sort of feel like my love for ABBA has been more of a contraceptive in the long run). 

So Here We Go Again is a stupid but irritatingly functional feel-good film, and interestingly it’s been argued that this is exactly what we need right now. Because with the news being dominated by Trump, ISIS, and The Labour Party (I’m aiming for balance here), watching someone beautiful cartwheeling through an orchard singing I Have A Dream (she’d had a dream about apples) is the only way of forgetting how sad you are, which is the 2018 equivalent of being happy.

But I disagree. Part of the problem with a film so preposterously escapist is that when you do return to your life, everything seems worse than ever. When I left the cinema I discovered some bird poo on my bike saddle which I cleaned off with a glove, then without thinking threw the glove in the bin. I’d normally shrug this off as a fairly standard bird poo/glove incident, but after watching Here We Go Again I just wanted to cry. There I was, fishing a glove out of a bin, and no-one even broke into song. ‘Bin’ rhymes with ‘win’ so it could have easily justified a rendition of The Winner Takes It All. But no. Nothing. It’s just depressing. 

I've never been this happy. It looks fun.

What we really need is the opposite. A musical about starvation or genocide. Something to give us a bit of perspective. Nickelback could do the songs, just to really ram it home. It would be perfect. People would leave the cinema utterly buoyed: laughing in the face of bird shit, bursting into song about how much clean running water there is.

What I'm trying to say is, right now the world is a bit of a mess. But things could be worse. A lot worse. So even if we're feeling down about the way things are going, it's important we don't make a song and dance about it - NAILED IT.