A great musical experience for tone deaf karaoke lovers

Rating: 1/10 (27 January 2009)

After so much hype, and having seen the stage show which was brilliant, I was hoping for something special from this movie. How wrong of me! It is a disaster - not because it is a flawed creation but because it has taken a superb piece of artistry and wrecked it, wonderful songs reduced to cinematic karaoke. Surely it would occur to the makers of a musical that the most fundamental requirement of it is that it should be musical! But no. All too obviously the producers have gone for the star names, presumably hoping that the audience will know and like them while being too young to have seen ABBA at work for real. It's all so embarrassing: Meryl Streep, looking like a demented retiree who has escaped by dressing up as Andy Pandy; Julie Walters, whose talent is totally wasted here; Pierce Brosnan, whose hairy chest cannot make up in my mind for his appalling 'singing',-it's too depressing to go on. Amanda Seyfried seemed to me to be the only actor who came out with any credit. The story is thin, but that's fine insofar as it is merely a scaffolding on which to hang ABBA's music and wonderful lyrics. But their legacy is trashed, most painfully when Streep tries to sing 'The Winner Takes It All', one of ABBA's most moving songs. The thought that this movie has made so much money is dispiriting to say the least. Benny and Bjorn were wary of letting this project go forward. They should have followed their gut instincts.