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Mamma Mia!
By Joey
Magidson
Oscar Queen Meryl is
misguided in nearly unwatchable, Mamma Mia!
Mamma Mia
is everything that last year’s Hairspray isn’t. While Hairspray
was lively, entertaining, and well acted, Mamma Mia is
dull, boring, and embarrassingly acted in a few cases. The music may be
good, but the film itself is a mess.
The film focuses on the desire of Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) to find out
the identity of her father. She deduces the 3 most likely candidate
that may have impregnated her mother (played by Meryl Streep, though I’m
not sure why she took this part) and invites them to her wedding. The
men are played by Stellan Skarsgard, Colin Firth, and Pierce Brosnan,
and once they arrive, well…they sing and they dance.
The first problem with Mamma Mia is that there’s not enough story to fill
up the film, so the music is even more essential than usual. The
problem there is that they have to only use ABBA songs, and too many of
them don’t properly lend themselves to the story. This makes the viewer
be repeatedly taken out of the plot to watch actors who can’t sing or
dance, well…sing and dance.
The second problem is that too many people in this film shouldn’t be in a
musical. In fact, the only person who doesn’t seem to be completely out
of place here is Seyfried. Sure, Meryl Streep makes an effort here, and
actually sings pretty decently, but she’s way above this kind of stuff.
The 3 men though, they don’t fare as well. Brosnan especially should be
embarrassed here. It almost seems like a high school play at some
points, that’s how troubling the singing in this is.
Finally, the direction left me wanting more. Phyllida Lloyd may have
found success on Broadway, but on the big screen, it’s a far different
case. She seems mostly incapable of making the film cinematic. That
makes this essentially a staged play, and those kinds of films never
seem to work for me. This is no exception.
If you love ABBA, there’s some enjoyment to be had here, but aside from
that, it’s pretty much a wasteland. Perhaps there’s a “so bad it’s
good” aspect to it, but for me, this film was simply “so bad it’s bad”
and nothing more. Mamma Mia the stage show was an exhilarating crowd
pleaser, but the film adaptation was completely and fully unable to
please me in the slightest.
*/****
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