Mary Poppins Returns (2018) is the sequel to the original Mary Poppins (1964). Even though it took 54 years for the new movie it wasn’t worth the wait.

Considering a 78% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 7.5/10 on IMDb I thought it would’ve been better. I understand that they don’t want to explain details such as where she comes from and how she gets to the Banks family home. I love that they do it that way, but I had many more problems with it.

Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt) is a mystery nanny that comes from the sky to take care of the Banks children. She brings magic that only the children can see and then forget about when they get older. This time around instead of taking care of Michael Banks (Ben Whishaw) and Jane Banks (Emily Mortimer), Mary Poppins is taking care of Michael’s three children Annabel (Pixie Davies), John (Nathanael Saleh) and Georgie (Joel Dawson).

With the first movie set in the 1910s and the remake set 20 years later in the 1930s. Michael Banks now as a young adult having three children of his own and a wife that died one year before, leaving him to care for them on his own along with the help of his sister Jane.

This is were Mary Poppins appears.

The plot of the movie wasn’t the best. I wish that they would have done something different to make it more interesting to watch. I got bored with it around the middle of the movie, I almost fell asleep. The whole thing about how Michael taking out a loan on his house and not being able to pay it back so the bank was going to repossess it worked but, but they lost it through the plot and went somewhere else and I thought that it was messy and not put together well.

The songs weren’t really that good in general and I really didn’t like most of them the only one that I really did like was Turning Turtles with Meryl Streep. It was really funny, cute and well put together. I didn’t like the other songs because they weren’t working with the movie. They just kinda started randomly and ended randomly as well.

I did like the cast because everyone played their part and worked well together but the acting was rough. Sometimes their voice cracked during the music which is a completely natural thing, but I wish that they would’ve wanted to put on the best show and give the world the best movie that it could be.

The sets looked really fake when they were doing the song “Trip a Little Fantastic” and when they were dancing on the street lights. And it just didn’t look good at all and I couldn’t focus on anything else but that.

When they jumped into their mother’s China bowl it just didn’t flow with the movie. It was really weird and didn’t look or sound nice in the theater. It was visually unappealing and audibly unappealing. It didn’t work with the rest of the movie and I was hoping that it would be like the original when they jumped into the chalk drawing and it was a fun animated part. But they were trying to add a bad guy into the movie and it was just weird.

This day in age movie production companies are trying to add an antagonist into all the movies and sometimes it just doesn’t work. They needed to try a different angle in Mary Poppins Returns. Something other than a greedy banker just in search of money.

I thought to go into the movie that they would use some original songs such as “A Spoonful of Sugar” but they didn’t. They did have Dick Van Dykes from the original movie in the sequel. I did like seeing that they did want the same feel from the original. Like instead of chimney sweepers they used lamplighters which I did end up liking that idea. And they didn’t make it a “modern” movie by making it set in 2018.

Dick Van Dykes character Mr. Dawes Junior was a banker but he didn’t have a big role and only shows up at the end to be the hero and help the Banks save their house. He was mentioned a few times throughout the story as well. But it worked with how the story was put together.

I really didn’t like this movie because of the bad acting during some of the big parts and the music wasn’t the best. They could have done a better job at making this movie the best it could be. It wasn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen, but it’s not the best either. I would rate this movie 2 ½  stars out of 5.