-By David Noh

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Everyone’s favorite snaggle-toothed, uni-browed, wart-ridden governess, Nanny McPhee (Emma Thompson), is back in Nanny McPhee Returns. This time, it’s World War II, and she’s in charge of an impecunious family consisting of Isabel Green (Maggie Gyllenhal) and her children, who tend to their farm, while Daddy (Ewan McGregor) is away at war. They are joined by their young, snottily citified cousins, who provide the essential impossible-brat element necessary for Nanny to do her best magical work.

The best thing about this sequel is the visual design of its sets and costumes, which have all the piquant, shabby-chic charm the rest of the film sorely lacks. It gets off on the wrong foot almost immediately with a recurring theme of farm-animal poop—a cow defecating—that is as disgusting as it is unfunny. When Maggie Smith, at the absolute low point of an illustrious career, as a dotty old lady decides to sit on a cowpat and enthusiastically squeals, “It’s so comfy!,” you realize that however bad the later vehicles of Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn may have been, they never had to stoop to such depths. Emma Thompson’s self-indulgent, twee and vulgar script is really off the mark this time, while director Susannah White desperately tries to goose things up with a silly synchronized swimming sequence involving a passel of whimsical pigs and unending, chaotic chase scenes. The overall effect is noisome and numbing.

Thompson retains that uncanny imperturbability from the first Nanny movie, but the one-note emoting and saturnine reveling in the grotesque become monotonous—at least Julie Andrews’ Mary Poppins, as sterilely pretty as she was, had songs. Ralph Fiennes has a cameo as a stern, unloving uncle and, as in that other Andrews governess-y vehicle, The Sound of Music, is as Pauline Kael described Christopher Plummer: the spider on the valentine. Gyllenhaal overworks her British accent, as she has recently on the New York stage, and Rhys Ifans is stridently unamusing as her villainous brother, trying unsuccessfully to escape from two money-lending harpies (annoyingly overplayed by Sinead Matthews and Katy Brand). The one cast standout is little Eros Vlahos, who with his imperious, dandified air, is like a miniature Oscar Wilde, a small island of wit in a sea of flailing desperation.