could it get any worse?

Rating: 1/10 (20 December 2008)

I suppose some women will find the film wonderful; so it's risky for a guy to point out how really BAD a movie this is. Also, many will find the movie charming for what for me was the main reason for walking out on it half way through - the music of ABBA, the aural equivalent of having someone scrape your face with frozen moose do.
But the whole film is as vapid and silly as the music's lyrics. First, there's never any story development, just one empty and embarrassing song after another. Then there's the god-awful 'choreography' - the worst of it was the line-up of young men doing god-knows-what kind of muscle beach posing wearing floppy swimming fins - pure (unintentional) self-parody, it was straight out of Monty Python.
The final nail in the coffin is the acting - there's so much ham on the screen, Jews and Muslims are committing sin watching this film. Meryl Streep is particularly embarrassing - only William Shatner mugs this bad, and he does it professionally, it's what people pay him to do. Is that what they paid Streep to do? Then she should refund their money, but she does about ruins her reputation as an actress with this one. She here looks like nothing more than a drag queen Tallulah Bankhead. I mean she was PATHETICALLY amateurish - which I suppose fits in with the rest of the amateurish display of rotten ham here.
Oh, but let's not forget the dumb blonde daughter at the center of the - ahem, 'story'? Anyway, I almost forgave the actress doing a terrible job performing her, since she is THE most ANNOYING adolescent character ever devised for motion pictures. You almost got to feel sorry for the poor slob marrying her - except that he is the second most ANNOYING adolescent character devised for motion pictures.
But of course, there's the music - as sterile and puerile as I remember it from the early eighties, the soundtrack for the Reagan era that finally gave us Bush II hell - slightly 'updated' (slowed down) to appeal to (what else?) aging ABBA fans - aging 'valley girls' with an inheritance and the personality-dysfunctional males who married them in order to avoid working for a living, like John McCain. His favorite song 'Dancing Queen' is presented in all its empty-headed insultingly self-satisfied narcissistic glory, replete with aging ingénues pretending to be young.
And despite its rapid song-to-song pace, the film is PAINFULLY DULL - with neither plot development nor character development, what is it we're to be interested in, anyway?
An absolute insult to any one who loves music or musicals or film. The worst film of the year - perhaps of th next half-century.