Meryl, Meryl - WHY?

Rating: 2/10 (26 October 2009)

In a word - friends told me to see this. They said it was great fun, a truly enjoyable, giddy musical. They are no longer friends of mine.
From the first few minutes, this is just plain awful. Having made it through most of this mess, I can only speculate that people believe that a screen full of girls and boys and men and women jumping about with crazed smiles for a couple of hours is what constitutes energy and fun in a movie. To me, it constitutes a desperate frenzy of fakery. EVERYTHING is forced, EVERY laugh - and there are two million - is over-the-top, and EVERYTHING is rammed down your throat, a marked contrast to the breezy confidence of the great MGM musicals. Not even the enormously watchable Christine Baranski can save herself in this sloppy mess of ceaseless, frenetic bilge.
PS The setting did bring to mind Cassavetes' 'Tempest', a clinker of another genre. Somebody, please - the Greek islands deserve a break.