Unworthy Screen Version Ultimately Sinks like a Rock!

Rating: 4/10 (20 July 2008)

There's quite a lot good in the movie version of Mamma Mia. Unfortunately that's offset by way-too-much bad. Like having filet mignon for dinner -- served cold; you gotta ask why?
To begin with the good, the girl playing Sophie is just perfect in every scene, and she generates much of the emotion in the story. The music is wonderful, but neither as good, or abundant as in the stage version.
To begin with the bad, the stage version managed to immediately place the audience on an island in Greece by using a few very basic stage sets; the movie's vastly expanded setting fails absolutely to place the story in Greece. Contributing to this is the liberal-agenda casting of the bartender role by a strange looking Jamaican actor. Hmmm! Only a liberal with a diversity agenda would fail to realize the role ought be played by a handsome young Greek. Where do you find a handsome Greek in Greece: Easier than finding sand in the desert. But the liberal diversity agenda comes first, appropriate casting doesn't matter.
The three older women are genuinely dis-likable in the movie. Washed up hippie s...ts (their word, not mine) and proud of it. The druggies of yesteryear haven't matured at all. (Not so with the three men.) In the play the women were a sympathetic trio; not here.
The photography is often excellent but is too frequently awful and careless. The worst of many examples is having the wedding scene in a small dimly lit church instead of outside in the sunshine. It's dark in there, you ninnies!
It takes two to make a romance, and while Sophie's role is perfect, where did they get the guy who plays her soon-to-be husband? He looks like a towel-jockey at the beach club. There is NO chemistry between them. In the final scene when the couple leave together, a real emotional swallow-hard in the play, the boy friend is completely off camera. We know he's there (more or less) but the only person the camera sees is Sophie.
Here were two flubs to disappoint the female audience. Not casting a handsome Greek in the role of the handsome Greek; and not casting a guy with sex appeal (or emotional appeal) as the fiancé. 4 out of 10.