Pummeling Mamma Mia! a Cry for Help
I am a fan of musicals. I think both The Band Wagon and Singing in the Rain are two of the greatest Hollywood pictures ever made. I watch The Sound of Music religiously each New Year. I thrill to the glories of Cabaret every time I watch it. I find both Moulin Rouge and Chicago to be modern classics of the genre.
Meryl Streep and Amanda Seyfried conspire to murder audiences in Universal Pictures' new musical Mama Mia!
With that in mind, please understand when I say the film version of the Broadway smash Mamma Mia! is close to being one of the most annoyingly god-awful movie musicals I have ever had the displeasure to try and endure I really, truly, 100-percent completely mean it. This thing didn’t just make me uncomfortable and sad, I darn near say it physically hurt me.
What’s funny about my reaction to this film is that bits and pieces are actually kind of impressive. I never realized how profound and sometimes even beautiful some of the songs by 1970’s disco supergroup ABBA really were. More, I didn’t think for moment Mean Girls weathergirl and “Big Love” daughter Amanda Seyfried possessed so much charm and poise (or, for that matter, a set of pipes so alive and alluring they nearly put the majority of the pop starlets out there working today to shame).
Considering I tend to be a pushover when I find something inside a movie to celebrate those things would get the project a pass. Not a chance. I simply do not care about the things that work here. What does it matter if Christine Baranski can belt out a show tune and steal a May-December production number like no other when the musical she’s doing it in has already pummeled the viewer into a state of catatonic unconsciousness? This is a film that slaps you senseless from the very first frame, the almost Road Runner-like pace of it all so exhausting I wanted to call it quits within the first thirty or so minutes.
Listen, any project that can take a dynamic virtuoso talent like Meryl Streep and make her look both uncomfortable and embarrassed in the span of a nanosecond has got major problems. One that does the same thing to fellow thespians like Pierce Brosnan (who should never, ever be allowed to sing ever again), Colin Firth, Julie Walters, Stellan Skarsgård and the aforementioned Baranski should be immediately flushed down the toilet hopefully never to be heard from again.
That is Mamma Mia! in a nutshell, and for the life of me I can’t quite fathom how such a thing could ever have been unleashed upon an unsuspecting public. How this works in the theater I cannot say (and considering it’s been playing for nearly a decade with no signs of stopping I can only assume it plays quite well) but as a movie musical it works about as well as pouring sulfuric acid on a bug bite. The movie is a constant state of overkill murderously bludgeoning all viewers foolhardy enough to try and enjoy it, director Phyllida Lloyd making as poor a transition from stage to screen as any I have ever seen.
Let me put it like this. This is a movie that had me screaming “S.O.S.” right from the start and “I Have a Dream” that slipping down to Hell would be more enjoyable then watching it for second time which means if I had spent any of my hard-earned “Money, Money, Money” on it I would have been royally peeved. “When All is Said and Done,” the only thing that would make me happy is if a picture as bad as Mamma Mia! had the good fortune to meet a box office “Waterloo” befitting its loudly obnoxious crap-tacular singing voice.
Film Rating: ê (out of 4)
