Review of Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018) by Janemy — 21 Jul 2018

I loved Mamma Mia! and liked Mamma Mia! Here we go again. I would have liked it so much better if the new movie followed Donna's diary from the first movie and the music had a much fuller sound. The timeline wasn't right in #2 and would have been so easy to fix with the way the characters were setup.

Donna meets Harry in Paris where they don't have sex and then follows her to Greece where they do have sex. It's not hard to do. They could have had the whole Waterloo song and dance scene with her at a Paris music shop where he buys her the guitar, starts playing Waterloo, takes off his shirt for part of the sale, and people passing by join in the song.

Even having a bust of Napoleon on the sidewalk would have been so easy. He could follow her to Greece, sees her after Sam's left, asks to see the island, and it would have fit right into the diary entry from #1.

Since it was an "oh what a night" sort of diary entry for Donna, it shouldn't have had any of the Harry is really gay overtones to it. When Donna is in Greece, she should have spent more time with Sam seeing the whole island since he was her main guy.

They would talk about the hotel idea and him sketching the plans for it. They totally skipped that. Bill doing a boat race in Greece was a better link to the actual diary, but it still opted to not include much of the relative on the Greece mainland for who Donna would later work for and name Sophie after.

They could have had such great scenes of them sailing around the island and actually being on the island where they have their "oh what a night" experience. So much of the music in the movie is a cappella or minimal accompaniment.

Abba music needs to have a full sound. The lip syncing of Cher was really bad. They could have done so much more with her character as well. Dancing Queen seemed to have solos with the chorus of singers heavily muted.

Please NO! Mamma Mia! needs to be high energy with a strong music track to go with the vocals. If the diary timeline had been fixed and the music done with higher energy, I would have loved it as much or more as the first one.

I can even enjoy Pierce Brosnan's singing with a good sound track to back him up.