Nanny McPhee: The Big Bang
Who said country life was easy? Mrs Green (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is at the end of her rope. Her three children - Norman, Megsie and Vincent - are constantly fighting with each other, her husband is away at war and hasn't been heard from in months, her brother-in-law Phil (Rhys Ifans) is pressuring her to sell him half of the family farm, and her employer, Mrs Docherty (Maggie Smith), is beginning to behave very oddly indeed. On top of all that, her posh niece and nephew, Celia and Cyril Gray (Rosie Taylor-Ritson and Eros Vlahos), are being sent to the farm from London for an unlimited stay - another burden for the frazzled Mrs Green. However, the situation gets worse when it emerges Uncle Phil needs to acquire the farm to pay off a gambling debt to Mrs Biggles, who has sent two female thugs, Miss Topsey and Miss Turvey, to ensure a payment of his IOU. In the midst of this drama, Cyril and Celia from the city show up a day early in a purple Rolls-Royce to 'The Land of Poo' from the 'Land of Soap and Indoor Toilets'. The clash of city and country causes instant mayhem, reducing Mrs Green to an even greater nervous wreck. Attempting in vain to bring peace to the warring in-laws, a knock at the door stops everything as Nanny McPhee (Emma Thompson) appears, repeating her well-known phrase: "When you need me but do not want me, then I must stay. When you want me but no longer need me, then I have to go." The Nanny McPhee character began as Nurse Matilda, the central figure of bedtime stories in the family of Christianna Brand and her cousin, Edward Ardizzone, who illustrated the books. The stories were passed down over 100 years, with each generation adding to the legend of the family's ill-behaved children and the supernatural nanny who arrives to tame them. Brand first wrote them down in the 1960s and, by that time, they had achieved a timeless quality that Thompson has endeavoured to preserve in her scripts. The story and characters are new, but the basic attributes of a Nurse Matilda/Nanny McPhee story - her lessons, her looks that change from hideous to beautiful as the children come to love her, her magic stick - remain the same. Packed with whimsical characters, anchored by Thompson and Ifans as the dastardly Uncle Phil, this episode of what will surely be a series of 'Nanny' films tops the previous film for action, slapstick and general comedy. Peppered with moral lessons, the film is a charming mix of old-fashioned values and modern special effects. Thompson proves her Oscar years ago for 'Sense & Sensibility' was no fluke with another script that manages heartfelt emotion with regular laugh-out-loud moments. This is one nanny every family will take to their hearts this Easter - especially if the weather is bad and a trip to the cinema becomes necessary.