Mamma Mia!

Rating: Null/10 (17 December 2008)

So you meet a girl and you start talking, things are going really well, you share a lot of common interests. You're especially attracted to her because she loves both "Mulholland Dr." and "Lifeforce" and can discuss the minutest details of labyrinthine television giant "Lost". Another common interest is a shared, unabashed love of ABBA. You ask her if she's seen "Mamma Mia!", she says she hasn't but probably wants to at some point though it looks cheesy. The DVD's out a couple of days from the conversation, so she suggests watching it together. Now it's Wednesday, the DVD was out yesterday, but knowing that she has a thing for aging, over-the-hill action stars and the movies they are involved in you attempt, after watching the sugary-sweet trailer for "Mamma Mia!" again, to avoid it by suggesting that you rent "Rambo" instead (she doesn't know that you rented "Mamma Mia!" the night before this phone call). To your surprise she expresses relief, and you watch Stallone destroy what seems like the entire Burmese military force. The movie's dark and grim, more so than you expected, and not very good, but you have fun and everything goes great. Now you're confronted with the choice of either wasting your "Mamma Mia!" rental or sitting through it alone.
What the heck, right? No. This was one of the most painful things I've ever sat through. Last year Julie Taymor made "Across the Universe", a lunkheaded, moronic, unbelievably simplistic and ridiculous movie set in the sixties using Beatles music, but it had a good cast, good performances of the songs, a neat visual style, and a dependable sort of romantic feel that took me by surprise. "Mamma Mia!" on the other hand, is a musical where NOBODY can sing OR dance, where every scene is dumber than the last one, where "Dancing Queen" is reduced to something far worse than even having a girl over and then realizing that your mom's friends are coming over for drinks under the pretense of them being 20 again, and having to be in the same house as all that. There's not one good performance here, not one good line of dialogue, the film is flat and boring visually, the choreography is unbelievably awful, and the story as bland and idiotic as can be.
What a completely worthless, putrid waste of space which didn't provide a second of entertainment, which butchered every song, which was clearly done without any energy or commitment, as an internet acquaintance of mine said, it feels like a bunch of stars taking advantage of a paid vacation to Greece. What a completely horrible film, what an insult to ABBA and to fans of their music. ABBA didn't become popular because they appealed only to women over 35 or gay men, and while I've enjoyed several things with that target audience this is so exclusively aimed at that audience that it truly boggles the mind. Get someone to write a good musical based on ABBA songs, PLEASE.