But, ugh, what a drag. Very little plot actually occurs over the space of 108 minutes of ABBA songs, strung together like a hokey join-the-dots and interspersed with endless scenes of screaming women. The Guardian's review contained this little excerpt that went a long way toward explaining where the movie's faults lie...
Mamma Mia! The Movie is very different. Everything has been squeaky-cleaned up. It too has a feelgood wedding motif - but there is no irony, no heartache, certainly no paralysing illness, no dramatic plausibility, and weirdly, no hint that the characters know whose songs they are singing; there is no sense of perspective on the music.
No irony. In a film this cheesy, this camp, it all seemed to be played surprisingly straight.
Before the movie began, a trailer for High School Musical 3 played, and worryingly, Mamma Mia! came over completely similar in tone. Now, I'm not against the musical genre - Chicago is one of my favourite films and after The Dark Knight, Sweeney Todd is probably my film of the year - but when the movie itself is ultimately conflict-free and features an ending where literally everybody on the planet is happy and dancing and living happily ever after... it's almost insulting. It's not a cerebral movie (I'm aware I'm making that criticism on a James Bond forum, but the Bond films, at least, have some impressive filmmaking to be found within), but Mamma Mia! is almost lazy in its willingness to be so happy and cheerful. I can't recall the last time I saw a movie that actively encouraged its audience to switch off completely.
I'm not an ABBA fan either, so the songs - while I can appreciate them for what they are - didn't particularly appeal to me. The cast were adequate (Streep, Seyfried and Skarsgård were the only real standouts) and our boy Pierce still looks great (how he sounds was a topic of debate among the four of us who saw it).
I dunno. In the words of Austin Powers, I guess it just wasn't my bag, baby.
