Welcome back to the magical island of Kalokairi, a sun-strewn rocky outcropping in the azure Aegean Sea, a land where white people can only express themselves with the music of Sweden’s most enduring musical group, ABBA. The sequel/prequel hybrid Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again arrives a decade after the bonkers filmed adaptation of the stage musical Mamma Mia! Vehicles for ABBA’s songs, the films perfectly reflect the music: guileless, emotionally raw and unabashedly cheesy, wrapped in miles and miles of colourful synthetic fabric.
This many lovelorn ABBA songs requires quite a story into which to shoehorn the tunes, and Mamma Mia! tripled down on love lost and found with three spurned lovers, Bill (Stellan Skarsgård), Sam (Pierce Brosnan) and Harry (Colin Firth), returning to Kalokairi for the wedding of Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), who hoped to find her father. Now, she’s accepted all three men as adopted dads, and she’s reopening the hotel after her mother’s death (yep, there’s almost no Meryl Streep here). While she gives tours to visitors around the property, she reminisces about her mother’s journey to the island, right out of Oxford. We get the part of the story previously only detailed in a journal, of young hippie Donna (Lily James) and her three wayward lovers.
James has proven a winsome presence in Cinderella, Baby Driver and Darkest Hour, but Here We Go Again is a breakout superstar moment for her as the free-spirited, earthy and open-hearted Donna. She’s an inspired singer and dancer, and every time the film cuts away from her story is a bit of a disappointment — even though it’s always entertaining to see what new ways the filmmakers have dreamed up to humiliate Skarsgård and Firth. But young Donna’s story is so much more emotionally engrossing, and the casting of Donna’s friends, the Dynamos (Jessica Keenan Wynn and Alexa Davies) is spot on, as well as her lovers Harry, Bill and Sam (Hugh Skinner, Josh Dylan and Jeremy Irvine). The newcomers all take to the wild rules of this cinematic universe with gusto.
Director Ol Parker takes over writing and directing duties from Phyllida Lloyd and Catherine Johnson (who wrote the book of the stage musical). Richard Curtis also gets a story by credit, and it makes sense — Donna is right in his wheelhouse, given his proclivity for writing sensual, carefree American babes.
In Parker’s hands, the sequel is far more grounded and melodramatic, lacking some of the rambunctious pop and fizz Lloyd brought to Mamma Mia, the cinematic equivalent of trucker speed. There’s a lot less running and singing, and singing while running, but there is, of course, a flotilla of boats filled with people enthusiastically performing choreography to Dancing Queen.
There’s also still enough crackpot insanity to go around: a particularly surreal version of Waterloo is set in a French restaurant, and Christine Baranski gets several crackerjack lines. We haven’t even gotten to Cher yet, who arrives like a benevolent rock deity and turns the last 20 minutes of the film into a personal concert. She’s playing Sophie’s grandmother, but truly she’s just playing herself, and her sheer presence is applause-worthy.
Much like its predecessor, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is escapist fluff of the highest order — joyful, filled with beloved pop songs, and incredibly bizarre. Go ahead and treat yourself to this raucous seaside summer confection, you deserve it. — TNS

Unfriended: Dark Web is too real to be fun


Back in 2014, when the computer-based Unfriended was released, the kind of online menace we could imagine was mostly bullying — an anonymous mob unleashed online. That was even the platform First Lady Melania Trump announced as the issue she was going to tackle in the White House. That all seems so quaint these days. Now, in the summer of 2018, with the release of Unfriended: Dark Web, the online threats to the very fabric of our existence are so much realer, and so much more human. Foreign hackers are being indicted for meddling in United States elections, bitcoin and blockchain are on everyone’s lips (even if no one really understands them), and Unfriended: Dark Web is poised to capitalise on the zeitgeist.
The smartly-constructed sequel to Unfriended is written and directed by Stephen Susco, a seasoned horror screenwriter making his directorial debut. He uses the same device as the first film, taking place entirely on a computer screen, populated by a Skype session among a friend group of young adults who live their lives online. The story is woven together from the traces and pieces of themselves they leave smeared on the Internet, stitched together for our entertainment with a sense of the multitasking, attention-deficit way our brains seem to work while surfing the web.
It’s game night for the group of college pals who convene on Skype to play Cards Against Humanity and catch up with each other. Our avatar, the person whose screen experience we’re experiencing, is Matias (Colin Woodell). He’s just had a spat with his girlfriend, Amaya (Stephanie Nogueras), via Facebook chat over a program he’s attempting to develop to ease their communication (she’s deaf, and he’s terrible at sign language). But he has high hopes for his program with a new-to-him laptop, as soon as he can sign the old user out.
The prior owner of the laptop has left a pesky digital residue. Random, persistent Facebook messages pop up with promises of large amounts of money for a mysterious custom job. Matias is drawn into the realm of the dark web, a journey he takes his friends on with him as they chat together. What they find on the laptop reveals a deep network of individuals willing to trade huge sums of money for hideously cruel and depraved acts. And now that Matias has the laptop and they’ve discovered the group, the targets are on their backs.
The storytelling craft of Unfriended: Dark Web is fascinating to watch, as it unspools entirely on Facebook, Skype, FaceTime and other modes of communication on a computer screen. But as a horror film, it’s incredibly grim. There’s no real excitement or cat-and-mouse games to play here. Once the group has been identified, it’s simply a matter of waiting to see how gruesomely the secretive dark webbers will weaponise the Internet against the group of innocent kids. Frankly, it’s just no fun.
Perhaps it’s no fun because it’s just too real. There’s never a moment of wondering what is going on. We’re all too aware of the nefarious and evil forces regularly going to work to disrupt our lives daily, and we’ve seen the repercussions of their actions play out on the news every day. While Unfriended: Dark Web is a clever concept of cinematic design and storytelling, it proves to only be a deeply chilling cautionary tale. — TNS