Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again review round-up: 'A love poem to the primal bond of mothers and daughters'

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again , the follow-up of the 2008 musical comedy Mamma Mia, will once again see the film’s cast along with a few new faces sing and dance onscreen to the Swedish pop group ABBA’s hits. The new film tells the story of how Sophie’s (played by Amanda Seyfried) mother Donna (Meryl Streep) came to live on the Greek island of Kalokairi, started her own hotel and met Sophie’s fathers Sam, Bill and Harry (Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgård and Collin Firth). [caption id=“attachment_4768311” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] Lily James as young Donna in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. Twitter @RadioTimesFilm[/caption] Directed by Ol Parker_, Mamma Mia 2_ will also see the addition of Cher as Sophie’s grandmother and Lily James essaying the role of a young Donna.  Christine Baranski and Julie Walters reprise their roles as Tanya and Rosie. Alexa Davies star as a young Rosie, Jessica Keenan Wynn as young Tanya. Jeremy Irvine is young Sam, while Josh Dylan is young Bill and Hugh Skinner plays young Harry. Rotten Tomatoes has given the sequel 89% rating. So far, early reviews of the film that releases on 20 July have been positive. IndieWire pointed out that the absence of Meryl Streep’s performance from the film was keenly felt. However, Lily James as a young Donna “finally seems like the one to catapult the actress to the next level of her career, while also keeping the dizzy (and dizzying) musical afloat.” Variety wrote, “Here We Go Again is another kitsch patchwork; it’s as if you were watching the CliffsNotes to an old studio weeper that happened to be carried along by some of the most luscious pop songs ever recorded. Yet the feeling comes through, especially at the end – a love poem to the primal bond of mothers and daughters.” “That first film made me break out in a combination of hives and bubonic plague. And to be honest, this new one does have the original film’s plotless melange of feelgoodery, an exotically amorphous jellyfish of a film which is periodically zapped with the million-volt shock of a zingingly brilliant Abba tune. But something in the sheer relentless silliness and uncompromising ridiculousness of this, combined with a new flavor of self-aware comedy, made me smile in spite of myself: There are funny, campy performances from Cher, Christine Baranski, Julie Walters and also Alexa Davies as Walters’s younger self, and some very good lines,” wrote  Guardian. Vulture described the sequel as a “mom movie, in every way imaginable” and said, “Here We Go Again replicates that exact same feeling ten years and one or several economic collapses later, a feeling only revved up by the almost complete absence of Meryl Streep and the addition of Cher.” “Here We Go Again is a bright, cheerful, colorful, large-scale musical montage of gorgeous people singing and dancing to mostly happy tunes. You might even say that it’s everything you ever want, everything you ever need, right in front of you,” wrote  Forbes. The publication also called it “the Godfather Part II of Mamma Mia movies”.