A decade after the first film, it's time to go back to a small Greek Island where the sun shines (nearly) all the time (one plot-related storm excused), love is constantly in season and everybody sings and dances to Abba songs all the time. And admittedly, this is entirely unnecessary and the choice to do a sequel to a jukebox musical does mean you're either recycling songs or picking a score full of obscurities most of the time - but Abba's a band with a lot of songs, some of which didn't make the first movie, and others that can possibly take another go-around (particularly given that - hey, it is a full decade since the first one).
This does beat the challenge of sequalisng a romantic comedy plot, though, by Godfather 2-ing the whole thing - Lily James playing the young Meryl, arriving in a new country and establishing the family business, while Amanda Seyfried does the Al Pacino job of carrying it on and encountering new problems. All the significant cast members are back (yes, even Meryl who's supposed to be dead by the beginning of this one comes back for another go-around). And if the flashback-heavy structure does seem like a chance to get a whole heap of cheaper actors to pad out the plot, it does mean we get to see three romances as we work our way through the circumstances of why there were three candidates for Seyfried's father in the first one. More importantly, perhaps, Christine Branski gets to sing and dance again, and Cher also gets helicoptered in at the last minute.
Look, this is blatantly unoriginal material. But the scenery is lovely, and if I don't expect James to ever equal Streep at her best, she does a reasonable job of carrying her section of the film. This is a comfortable hug of a movie that you can only object to if you want something like depth. And honestly, I don't really want a third go-around here - Nobody should ever go the full Godfather 3.
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