ABBA palaver

Rating: 5/10 (18 October 2018)

The surprise smash hit musical of its year, sweeping up a bunch of hit songs by ABBA who'd split and last recorded as a group in 1982 into a slight if sunny musical set on a picturesque Greek island.
The plot could have been written on the back of one of the envelopes sent by the betrothed young daughter of Meryl Streep on the eve of her wedding to her mum's three summer-nights (oops, wrong musical) romances twenty odd years before, any one of whom could have been her father. Also on the island for the big day are Streep 's two ex-girl group singers and just to keep the three theme going, daughter Sophia's two girl-friends are there too. Much flirtation, confusion, indignation, reconciliation and elation duly follow accompanied of course by almost every ABBA song you can think of shoehorned into helping the plot along.
I couldn't bring myself to dislike it, even if the plot had more cheese than Gorgonzola and the acting more ham than Denmark. The singing by the leads is mixed in quality with Meryl Streep surprisingly good and Pierce Brosnan unsurprisingly not so good.
This feelgood harmless piece of fluff I guess did me no harm and made me feel okay even if it omitted highlighting some of ABBA's best songs like "Name Of The Game", "Knowing Me Knowing You" and "Summernight City" while I could have done without hearing some of their worst like "I Do I Do I Do I Do", "I Have A Dream" and "Thank You For The Music".
But that was always ABBA for you, sometimes brilliant sometimes terrible and I suppose the best I could say about this film was that it was neither brilliant or terrible.