Meryl Streep is the dancing queen!

Rating: 7/10 (30 July 2008)

Like most musicals, Mamma Mia! does nothing to hide its blatantly artificial nature: it's a collection of intermittently enjoyable songs by the Swedish pop group ABBA and deliberately ridiculous coreographies, all woven together by a thin yet somehow plausible "plot" and carried by a committed cast. It's silliness for its own sake, and most of the time it actually works.
The story unfolds on a Greek island where a young girl, Sophie (the lovely Amanda Seyfried), is about to marry her beloved Sky (Dominic Cooper), her mother Donna (Meryl Streep) and her "aunts" (Christine Baranski and Julie Walters) being in charge of making everything perfect. Only Sophie's father is missing, and for a very good reason: not even Donna knows who he is! Nevertheless, Sophie manages to retrieve her mother's diary and finds three potential dads thanks to it: Sam Carmichael (Pierce Brosnan), Harry Bright (Colin Firth) and Bill Andersson (Stellan Skarsgård). Not knowing which one to invite, she makes sure all three of them show up. And as the titular song goes, here we go again...
The plot is, of course, utterly ludicrous, its sole function being to act as an introduction for the musical numbers (this has to do with the fact that the original stage version was created around the pre-existing songs). The singing and dancing is the movie's sole reason to exist, and there it has both its strength and its undoing: unlike, say, Chicago, it manages to retain its wild energy during the music-free "interludes", but unlike Chicago it also suffers from having set-ups of varying interest. Basically, it boils down to this: whenever Streep, who sings like an angel, or Brosnan, in his best non-Bond role to date, are involved, there is nothing better; otherwise, it's pretty much hit and miss (with more hisses than hits, unfortunately).
Overall, this isn't a movie people will remember with the same fondness as they do Moulin Rouge or The Sound of Music, but its delightful silliness, largely spot-on humor and exhilarating performances are enough to keep everyone entertained for a couple of hours.