[6.3/10] *Mary Poppins Returns* is technically a late sequel to the 1964 original, not a reboot. In this age of nostalgia, there is less and less tolerance for studios outright redoing their biggest hits. Instead, we demand new adventures that acknowledge the existence of the old, and extend the throughlines of the originals into the present. No soulless remakes for us, thank you!

*Marry Poppins Returns*, then, follows in the footsteps of so many of these late installments as more of a soft reboot in a sequel’s clothing. It is a Mad Libs version of the 1964 classic -- retaining the basic ideas of a family in need of a nanny, the structure and rhythm of the plot and musical numbers, and the archetypes from the Banks family and those orbiting 17 Cherry Tree lane -- while lightly remixing each element just enough to pass a new material. The movie never ventures too far from the familiar, while changing only so much as necessary not to play like a shameless ripoff of its forebear.

The results are aggressively “perfectly fine” rather than “practically perfect.” I rewatched the prior *Mary Poppins* film the evening before viewing this one, in the hopes that it would help to appreciate the little connections and call-and-response between the two movies. Instead, it only served as a reminder of how magical the 1964 release is, and how derivative and lacking in that pixie dust its 2018 successor is by comparison.

Which is not to say that *Mary Poppins Returns* is a bad film by any stretch of the imagination. It's ably made, if workmanlike in so many elements. Its performers march through the slightly-altered beats of the prior film with aplomb. And the whimsical, joyous spirit of this (gulp) franchise, while thoroughly photocopied, remains intact. As an original piece, it would more than pass muster; it just pales in comparison to the thing it’s so slavishly recreating and nominally updating more than half a century later.

What’s remarkable about that “solid but unspectacular” bow for the film is that it gets the hardest part of this soft reboot right. Emily Blunt is not Julie Andrews and doesn’t stoop to the level of impression, but she absolutely nails the prim-yet-snippy air and the subtly puckish bearing of the title character. Andrews’s Poppins is so iconic that it’s an impossible task to follow it, but Blunt plays as a more-than-worthy successor, capturing the wit and whimsy that defined the character and making her feel like a natural part of the secretly magical world she and the ostensibly more down-to-earth players inhabit.

But little else of the movie’s retreads land with such force. Almost every song in the picture has a counterpart from the 1964 film, and practically none of them stand up to the juxtaposition. Again, none would come close to qualifying as “poor” as standalone tunes, but Topsy’s song can’t match the goofball energy of “I Love to Laugh” and “Trip the Light Fantastic” is no “Step in Time.” The grand musical score lifted so much of the original *Mary Poppins*, and only “The Cover Is Not the Book”, a smash-bang triumph of clever lyricism showmanship, manages to harness that same sonic virtuosity.

Neither can *Returns* match its predecessor’s visual panache. Everything in the movie has that odd, off-putting, computer-generated sheen to it. Whereas the 1964 movie had a vaguely stage-y quality to it at times, it’s not hard to take CGI as the 2018 equivalent. But the attempts to harness the same for the otherworldly vibe Mary’s presence brought gives the film an anodyne quality in its images, rather than one of imagination and possibility. The lone exception, again, is the animated sequence inside the china bowl, which manages to do the original film one better in its beautifully-realized combination of the hand-drawn and the real.

It’s telling that the few elements which are totally original come off superfluous or miscalibrated. The film includes a romance between a grown up Jane Banks and Bert’s young apprentice, Jack (played with an appropriately bad British accent by Lin-Manuel Miranda), that adds nothing to the film. It makes an out-and-out villain out of Colin Firth’s bank manager, since apparently every children’s film must have one now-a-days whether it fits the material or not. And it throws in a race against the clock and excuse for something action-y where Mary Poppins can use her magic powers to help save the day rather than just cause merriment and nudge those in her care toward their own good decisions.

The most noteworthy change in that regard is the film’s flip of the dynamic between father and children from the prior movie. Here, it’s the kids who are too grown up and the dad who feels out of sorts. (And yet, still needs to remember the magic of youth too, I guess?, it’s not especially coherent). There’s some power to making Michael Banks the paternal figure and shifting the poles of the generational misunderstanding.

But it’s all couched in the recent loss of the children’s mother, which leads to weird tonal inconsistencies in an otherwise spritely film. Case-in-point, near the midpoint of the film, Ben Whinshaw gives this stunning dramatic performance where he admits his difficulties in processing his wife’s death and the hardships the family is facing that both knocks you out and feels roundly out of place in the movie. *Returns* never manages to strike that balance between piercing sentiment and joyful wonder, instead seeming alternatingly mawkish and saccharine.

At best, it can still borrow a little of the wonder from its forebear and come out alright. [spoiler]The movie finds the perfect use for Dick Van Dyke who hasn’t lost a whit of his delightful energy in the intervening years, and Angela Lansbury makes for a capable substitute in a role clearly meant for Julie Andrews.[/spoiler] There’s scads of little callbacks and echoes that prove fond reminders of favorite elements from the classic that made *Returns* possible.

Still, you can only get so far coasting on nostalgia. *Mary Poppins Returns* and its status as a late sequel implicitly promises its audience something more than just an ostensibly new dance performed with the same familiar steps. Instead, it can charitably be called a modern redress of the movie it’s now succeeding. Those same moves and flourishes were charming and delightful decades ago, but faithfully recreating them with a few minor twists makes this return engagement taste like reheated leftover of a great meal -- still tasty enough given the quality of the original preparation, but not nearly as good as when it was fresh.