Mary Poppins Returns: Because of course she does

A good rule to live by when it comes to sequels to movies that are more than 50 years old is keep your expectations painfully low! It certainly helped me enjoy Mary Poppins Returns, the sequel to the 54-year-old Disney classic.

Maybe you’ve heard the Oscar buzz about this movie. Maybe you’ve seen it show up on a top ten list somewhere and you are counting on this movie being excellent.

Trust me. KEEP YOUR EXPECTATIONS LOW!

Do not mistake the message in that advice. Mary Poppins Returns is a good movie featuring terrific animated sequences and fun but forgettable songs.

You are human though.

As much as you want to give yourself over to the moment, you are going to compare this movie to the 1964 classic, and while you might like what you are seeing in the 2018 sequel, there is no Julie Andrews and there is no Dick Van Dyke as Burt.

Emily Blunt is fine in the titular role. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Jack is a decent substitute. He even does his own terrible cockney accent. They are just not what you know in this world and it is a shock to the system.

Also, there’s a BMX stunt sequence, and another good rule to live by is, unless you’re watching Rad, something has gone terribly wrong with the script when you see sick BMX stunts show up on screen.

This movie is very British. It features joyless children and scheming corporate bosses which, if you think back to Christopher Robin, both seem to be a staple of Disney updates of classic stories this year.

Let me give you a quick recap here, because even though the runtime is listed at two hours and ten minutes, Mary Poppins Returns feels long!

Michael Winshaw (who I have never heard of before, but I bet is at the top of a column in some casting director’s notebook that says “sad, British”) plays Michael. Emily Mortimer (Jack Donaghy’s fiancee with hollow bones from 30 Rock) plays Jane. You know Michael and Jane. They’re the original Banks children from the 1964 movie. Anyway, they're all grown up now and Jack’s wife is dead, because Disney.

Michael’s life is falling apart without his. He has three kids to take care of, and they just don’t seem pleasant at all. Jane is trying to help, but it’s not really her job to raise these kids, so who can blame her for only being half-invested?

Michael is also in the process of having his house repossessed by the very bank he works for. Remember? The one that his dad worked for in the original movie? There is a whole banking sub-plot that I don’t really care to go into here. It can all be summarized with this sentence: keep your important documents in a safe and memorable place. The End.

Mary Poppins returns to help the Banks children, because that is the name of the movie. Michael learns to live again. Jack and Mary Poppins are best friends, because I guess every public utilities worker in London at this time knew Mary Poppins.

By the way, Jack is a lamplighter. I figured that meant he would be coming by and literally lighting street lamps and then covering the flame with those old-timer candle-puter-outer things. Nope. Turns out all he does is climb a ladder and turn the gas on or off. That is all there was to controlling public lighting back then.

Do you know how often I would be screwing with street lamps if I were a kid in ye olden days of Jolly Ol’ Londontown?

Now, let's get back to what I wrote earlier. There is a lot to like about Mary Poppins Returns. There is a 2D animated sequence that takes place on a porcelain bowl. It looks so perfectly like 1960s Disney innovation that it was a little emotionally overwhelming for someone like me that got more than one copy of Bed Knobs and Broomsticks stuck in his mother’s VCR as a kid.

Also, Blunt does a great job of capturing the spirit of Mary Poppins. Don’t forget that Mary Poppins may love the Banks kids, but she’s kind of a jerk to them throughout most of the movie. She talks to them like they are idiots. It’s kind of where most of the comedy comes from. I swear, if the character was allowed to cuss, this would be a great adult comedy.

Marry Poppins really did lay the foundation for Major Payne in that way.

This movie can be undeniably fun at times. At other times, it can be insanely creepy, like when the three dead-eyed Banks children see their father sobbing over the memory of their mother and decide to walk up to him and, showing no emotion, begin to sing right in his face. Like, I mean right in his face. It’s the most menacing sentimentality I’ve ever seen on screen.

You might have heard that Meryl Streep shows up in this movie. Her presence is clearly meant to do only one thing and that is sell t-shirts and coffee cups.

Her character uses the phrase “things are turning turtle” to describe things being weird or “upside down,” so to speak. She uses the phrase no less than four times in conversation and then does a whole musical number about it.

It reminded me of the summer of 1999 when the second-worst version of Anakin Skywalker used the phrase “so wizard” in place of the word “cool” in The Phantom Menace. Then, I imagine at George Lucas’s insistence, the phrase “so wizard” started showing up in Pepsi commercials advertising Phantom Menace themed cans.

Trust me. Next time you walk into the Disney Store at Crabtree you will see a sweatshirt with feet pointed upside down and the words “everything’s turning turtle” printed on it.

Is Mary Poppins Returns a good movie? Yes. Is it a masterpiece? No. Does Lin-Manuel Miranda deserve more movie roles? I mean, maybe. I don’t know. I’m all for anything that keeps him from doing his high school assembly version of a rap concert.