Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda give their all to a never charmless (but often charm-adjacent) movie that slavishly follows in the original’s footsteps
Once Disney decided to make a movie called “Mary Poppins Returns,” it automatically placed the film’s creators into something of a no-win situation: A sequel to the beloved, successful 1964 musical couldn’t stray too far from the previous movie lest it alienate fans, but for it to be too similar to its predecessor would call into question the point of making such a long-delayed follow-up in the first place.
It’s possible that there’s a filmmaker out there who could have threaded that particular needle in a way that would integrate the familiar into something new — the way J. Abrams did with the 2009 “Star Trek” reboot, for instance — but director Rob Marshall and screenwriter David Magee (“Life of Pi”) have taken the lane of least resistance and given us a clone that’s practically “Poppins” (1964) in every way.
The original film has a song about kites, so this one has a song about balloons. The male lead in 1964 was one of a cadre of dancing chimney-sweeps, and in 2018, we get light-on-their-feet lamplighters. Original “Mary Poppins” had its characters leap into an animated segment inside a sidewalk chalk drawing; “Mary Poppins Returns” has them enter the painted design on a porcelain bowl. And so on, and so on, until it appears that every single moment from the first movie will have some sort of correlative in the second.
Watch Video: ‘Mary Poppins Returns’ Trailer: Emily Blunt Sings and Dick Van Dyke Dances
Granted, if you’re looking to an existing film to provide a blueprint for a new one, there are worse places to start than “Mary Poppins.” And while performers Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda and songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman aren’t going to make anyone forget Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke and the Sherman Brothers, respectively, the new crew gives it their all to make this overly familiar retread go down in as delightful a way as they can.
