Early on in Mary Poppins Returns, the titular character is asked upon her arrival why she’s back, and she simply responds, “Same as the last time, to look after the Banks children.” And right then and there, the tone for this movie is set. Mary Poppins Returns is a well-meaning film that had a lot of big shoes to fill. The original film is a beloved Disney classic that is still adored to this day. The performances by Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke are iconic and the songs are some of the most memorable songs in all of Disney history. So this was a movie that was set up to get nothing but constant comparisons to the original. And it seems like the folks at Disney were well aware of that so instead of doing what they could to distance themselves from the original, they tried something a bit different. They welcomed everyone’s fondness for the original movie and tried drawing upon it at every chance they could get. And that ends up being this movie’s biggest problem.
It’s hard to avoid comparing Mary Poppins Returns to its 1964 predecessor because this movie serves to essentially rehash that exact movie. Right from the get-go, we’re introduced to an adult Jane and Michael Banks (now played by Emily Mortimer and Ben Whishaw, respectively), having changed quite a bit since we last saw them. Michael now looks almost identical to his father George, with a hairstyle and mustache that give off an appearance very similar to David Tomlinson. His personality has toned down to a bit more cynical and slightly more stern, just like how George seemed in the original movie. Jane is now a labor organizer, essentially mirroring the role of her mother in the original movie. Michael’s wife died a year prior and is running into some financial difficulties in order to raise his three kids and keep the Banks’ family house on Cherry Tree Lane.
And who appears when they need them the most is Mary Poppins (now played Emily Blunt), seemingly having not aged a day since they last saw her. As stated earlier, she’s now here to watch over the Banks children as Michael deals with his financial woes. This characterization of Mary feels more in line with how the character was written by P.L. Travers. Gone is the warmth that Julie Andrews brought to the role. She explains herself even less when she’s questioned and is a lot colder and much harsher. She almost instantly appears and beyond her “to look after the Banks children” line, says nothing more and immediately gets right into the swing of things with Michael’s three children. While I applauded the original Mary Poppins for moving at a fairly quick pace, there is such a thing as moving too quickly. While it’s played a bit for comical effect as if Mary had just stepped out briefly and returned like nothing ever happened, it just feels rushed. In the first film, Mary at least explained herself a bit and we got to know a little about her - as mysterious as she remained - before she jumped into her first big song-and-dance.
I will say, despite this new, colder take on Mary (or I guess I should almost say “old” take, since it’s essentially the original Travers version of the character), Emily Blunt does a fine job in the role. With everything else that gets rehashed in this movie, she did make it clear she did not just want to mimic Julie Andrews, and I at least applaud her for that. Blunt is an overall great actress and she makes this version of Mary clearly hers. She’s not as immediately likable as Julie Andrews but she does manage to get a few good one-liners in and does have this commanding presence that does make her interesting in her own right. She’s not the Mary Poppins we’re used to, but she at least does what she can to make herself stand out, which is very crucial.
The rest of the movie though is nowhere near as strong as Blunt’s performance. One big issue is how this movie almost tries to disprove that Mary is a magical being. Michael (and to an extent, Jane) is portrayed in a similar fashion to Ewan McGregor's titular role in Christopher Robin. He no longer believes in magic, and a major plot point is how he tries reasoning with the children that Mary's magic doesn't exist (despite the fact she looks exactly the same as she did years ago). While it was a comical reoccurring joke in the original that Mary would deny the events of the previous scene, this movie works to beat it into everyone's heads that this may all have been made up. When a good portion of a movie - especially a sequel full of already-established characters - is dedicated to disproving the logic of one or more of the main characters, it loses a bit of its charm.
When the movie isn't out to work against its own logic, everything else just feels like it’s the first movie just reworked slightly in order to seem different. There are definitely a fair amount of moments where some of the same beats happen in the exact same order. We get another animated sequence. We then get another scene where Mary visits a quirky relative that’s supposed to mimic the Uncle Albert scene from the original. We get musical numbers that essentially mimic songs like “Step in Time” and “Let’s Go Fly a Kite.”
Even the new character Jack (played by Lin-Manuel Miranda) is essentially just a rehash of Dick Van Dyke’s Bert. While the character flat out says he’s Bert’s apprentice - making it expected Bert did obviously have some influence on him - he has essentially all the same exact personality traits as Bert, works all the same sort of odd-jobs as Bert, and even has a lot of Bert’s mannerisms. Luckily, Lin-Manuel Miranda is an enjoyable enough performer in his own right that he had enough charm to make the character watchable enough. But it’s frustrating that he, just like the rest of this movie, is just another reworked portion of the original movie. One can take almost any moment in this movie and just line it up with something from its predecessor.
And this wouldn’t be such a big deal if all these moments were memorable in their own right. It’s one thing to pay tribute to a classic. Like I said, Mary Poppins is a huge movie to follow up, so doing something without acknowledging the original was going to be tough. Yet, one still needs to do something in order to make their own movie stand out. And the problem is that, while a lot of the songs and vignettes in this movie aren’t flat out bad, they are far from memorable. There are one or two exceptions to the rule, but for the most part, I couldn’t name a single song from this movie (the finale “Nowhere to Go But Up” is by far the highlight of the music so they at least saved the best for last). If I played them, I certainly wouldn’t mind listening to them but there was nothing as catchy or grandiose about these as there were about “Jolly Holliday,” “I Love to Laugh,” or even lesser known songs from the original movie like “Sister Suffragette.”
The one thing - besides its take on Mary - that this movie does different from the original is its inclusion of villain characters. Unlike the original where the closest thing we had to evil were just a few hard-nosed bankers who simply needed to lighten up, this movie has a blatant antagonist - the new head of Fidelity Fiduciary Bank, played by a woefully misused Colin Firth. Part of what made the original Mary Poppins unique was that it didn’t need a “good vs. evil” story in order to help evoke character development. It was essentially always good-natured in tone, even when it came into moments of conflict, and that’s rare for a movie. This movie, however, has an antagonist almost for the sake of having an antagonist, and he’s not even a well-written antagonist either. He’s completely one-dimensional, his motivations for wanting to close the Banks home never being made explicitly clear, and being evil almost for the sake of being evil. Firth is normally a great actor but this movie made horrible use of him. And the subplot involving the bank gives us one of the most contrived sequences in the entire movie, with the methods used in order to resolve the conflict being borderline cringe-worthy to watch.
The only good that comes out of this whole subplot is that it’s an excuse to see Dick Van Dyke back in action. Now playing Mr. Dawes Jr. - the son of the character he played in the original movie - we get a chance to briefly see the 93 year old actor show that he still has plenty of jump in his step. The man still has a lot of charm and energy about him after all these years, and his brief time on screen laughing, singing, and dancing is one of the movie’s highlights.
Mary Poppins Returns is not exactly a bad movie. It has a solid lead performance by Emily Blunt, and it does have enough moments of charm to keep you tuned in and make it to the end of the movie not totally dissatisfied. But the main issue with this is the fact that it feels too much like a retread of the original movie, without doing much to inject some life of its own into the mix. We’ve seen this story done before and done much better. Unlike its titular character, Mary Poppins Returns, unfortunately, is not practically perfect in every way.
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