You couldn’t get further away from The Dark Knight (also opening this week in Prague) than Phyllida Lloyd’s Mamma Mia!, an embarrassingly miscast musical akin to a Beach Blanket Bingo flick that has had all the fun drained out of it by the presence of A-list actors. ABBA’s music can be plenty fun, and Mamma Mia! has fleeting, all-too-brief glimpses of that fun.
But Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan and co. don’t really sing here; they tend to dictate the lyrics to us as if they had some greater meaning, warbling away like William Shatner minus the irony, and draining any entertainment value from the airy ABBA songs.
The result: musical torture the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Paint Your Wagon or Camelot; prepare for Brosnan’s garbled version of S.O.S. to reach internet meme status on a level only previously explored by Shatner or David Hasselhoff. And hey, why wait; here you go.
Amanda Seyfried stars as Sophie, a young woman about to marry fiancée Sky (Dominic Cooper) at her mother’s dilapidated hotel on a Greek island. She only has one regret: she’s never known her father. In an effort to find him, she invites the three men her mother was with around the time of her conception to the wedding, with the hopes to identify her true father through a nonstop parade of ABBA songs.
There’s your plot, no twists, no turns, nothing to really advance it beyond a single concept and the inevitable revelation at the end, and no points for guessing that ending, either. If you’re going to this film, I hope you love ABBA’s songs, and I hope you love when amateurs sing them. That’s what you’re getting here, in spades.
The first song we get is a rendition of I Have a Dream, sung by Seyfried to a pair of friends played by Rachel McDowall and Ashley Lilley, and I thought we’d be in for some good goofy fun.
Seyfried is terrific, perfectly suited to this material, a little box of cute with wide puppy-dog eyes. McDowall and Lilley share her enthusiasm (as does Cooper, along with the rest of the young cast, relegated to extra status), the island scenery is great, and hey, we could have fun with this on some kind of Frankie & Annette level.
But no; the two friends completely disappear from the film after that first song, as a parade of ‘proper’ actors are marched on in: Meryl Streep as the mother, Julie Walters and Christine Baranski as her friends, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, and Stellan Skarsgård as the father candidates. None of whom can sing, of course, and of course, the film lets them sing away for the rest of the movie, pushing the young, spirited cast to background scenery.
Brosnan is ridiculous, but the worst offenders are Walters and Baranski – I’m sorry, but Baranski is a dead ringer for The Goddess Bunny here – and the film is run into the ground with bad rendition after bad rendition.
Firth, perhaps, fares best, as he and Skarsgård have a mercifully light workload (the light workload cannot save Skarsgård, however). Streep is the most vocally talented, but she’s still completely unsuited to this material, and she knows it and looks embarrassed throughout. And we feel the same way.
And yet, while I cannot enjoy this film I can enjoy the existence of it on some perverse level. Go in with the right frame of mind and I dare say you’ll be entertained.
