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I have very few memories of the original 2005 version of NANNY MCPHEE, other than it starred Colin Firth, Kelly McDonald, and Emma Thompson as the magical nanny. I seem to recall relatively pleasant memories of the experience, and thought it was a nice one-off project for Thompson to dabble in between HARRY POTTER movies and An Education or the recent Brideshead Revisited. But for reasons I can't quite figure out, Thompson has returned to the roll of the witch-like tamer of children in NANNY MCPHEE RETURNS, set during World War II and featuring fewer children than the first film but just as many problems.

This time around, the household in question is a country farm being led by Isabel Maggie Gyllenhaal, whose husband the seen-mostly-in-flashback Ewan McGregor is off to war, leaving her to raise three young children and run a farm with almost no money. Her husband's brother Rhys Ifans has been pestering Isabel to sell the farm so he can get half the cash to pay off his debts, but she refuses without hearing from her husband on the matter. And while her kids are fairly well behaved, when their rich cousins drop in and clearly loathe the accommodations, fighting and bad behavior soon follow. Without much warning or prompting, Nanny McPhee arrives to teach the children her five valuable lessons and set them down the path to good behavior.

Borrowing her supporting cast of adult actors from the POTTER films (including Ifans who appears in the final two-part installment, Maggie Smith, and Ralph Fiennes), screenwriter Thompson and director Susanna White have worked out a likable enough story, but the dramatic elements seem somewhat forced and the villainous uncle subplot is just plain unneeded. All of the performances seem wildly overplayed, which I've come to expect from films aimed at children, but that doesn't make me enjoy the experience any more. Thompson brings some restraint to her role, as she did the first time around, but here she's almost a secondary force in a movie loaded with not-so-special effects, including synchronized pig swimming and flying barley. Hold me back.

NANNY MCPHEE RETURNS is such a slight effort that you almost feel bad picking on it. The child actors are pretty solid when they aren't acting like brats, and probably making the most of his cameo is Fiennes (as the head of the British War Office), who manages effectively to convey menace and caring in only what probably amounts to three or four minutes of screen time. Oh, he's good. NANNY MCPHEE RETURNS passes by fairly quickly and painlessly, but I suspect that in a matter of days, I will have completely forgotten the experience of watching it much like I did the first time around with the hideous caretaker. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad review, so I'm guessing I'm right up the middle. If you enjoyed in any small way the first film, you'll probably feel similar pangs while watching this one. That's the best I can do.

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