Rating 5/10
Confession - I've seen but don't remember too much of the original Mary Poppins.
I get, like the overall message. How we lose our innocence, wonder, curiousity and sense of anything is possible, as we age, grow from being a child to becoming an adult. Am not sure the chosen style of storytelling is the best way to deliver it, especially in today's era.
Mary Poppins (played by Emily Blunt), is a super nanny. For some reason she's connected to this particular family, had tended to the siblings Ben Whishaw and Emily Mortimer when they were kids and now arrives when trouble is brewing in their life. Ben's lost his wife, isn't doing too well financially (it's the time of the Great Slump), his house is about to get repossessed by evil bankers (headed by Colin Firth) and his 3 adorable kids are having to mature, become worldly way too soon due to their circumstances. Cue the return of Mary Poppins and soon the children are dancing, singing and believing in the impossible once again. The other characters include Lin-Manuel Miranda, Julie Walters, Meryl Streep (in little more than a cameo).
Emily Blunt is incandescent, am a huge fan and she didn't disappoint. The kids are lovely, everything you'd want them to be. But the rest of the movie meanders. Too much song, too much dance and too little story. I love The Sound of Music, has to be one of my, if not THE, all time favourites, so it's not that I'm against musicals but (I was mentally comparing) in Sound of Music, almost every song advanced / was critical to the story. Here, there were many instances of song for song's sake. And the story was too simplistic, highly predictable.
Probably a one time watch if you're a fan of the actor or the genre. And definitely worth showing the young ones (upto early teens) - perhaps kids nowadays age too fast and this could be an antidote.
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