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Rating: 6/10 (11 January 2019)

This famous musical is so shiny, so glossy and so enthusiastic about itself that one feels like a curmudgeon pointing out its structural flaws, but there's plenty of those to be found. For starters the story is rather strange and off-putting despite its shiny presentation, what with Amanda Seyfried's Sophie basically upending the lives of three strangers on a whim, and it only gets weirder from there. Meryl Streep is surprisingly miscast as Donna, wandering through the movie like she's acting in a different film than the rest of the cast, while much of her singing (especially on "The Winner Takes It All") is uneven and off-key. The same is true of Stellan Skarsgard, Colin Firth and (especially) Pierce Brosnan, and while all of them share on-screen chemistry, it's hard to enjoy a musical when the cast is not up for it. Overall however, the setting is aesthetically pleasing and of course the ABBA music is always a blast to hear, and there are some musical numbers that work very well, like the "Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight") segment that rescue the overall movie from doldrums.