Poor adaptation of terrible Musical

Rating: 3/10 (12 December 2008)

Growing up in the 80s, and having a fondness of electro-disco, I love ABBA. I also love movies and especially musicals.
Having seen the stage version of this show with my mother some 4 years ago, I went into this movie with exceedingly low expectations and still left disappointed.
Mamma Mia suffers from a story that features some of the most unsympathetic characters ever. From Merryl Streep as the woman who had unprotected affairs with three loves of her life in the same week and never informed any of the possible fathers that they had a daughter, to her over-the-hill girlfriends who can neither sing nor dance.
Nothing is taken seriously, but nothing feels natural either. Old-style musicals blend music into story lines naturally and the music is based around the story. Here, the opposite is in effect. The lyrics of the music often have only a passing applicability to the wafer-thin plot device and often contradict the story itself. I found myself forced to not listen to the lyrics other than the chorus which more often than not fit the story with the rest of the lyrics relegated to noise to be ignored.
It just doesn't gel.
Performances are uniformly bad from everyone but it is the script and the singing that is particularly bad.
The girl-power message of the movie seemed over-stated. True equality comes from treating everyone with respect equally, not from making a unilateral decision to remove a father/fathers from your child's life. Youth is treated as a big joke and entering into marriage when young is implied to be a huge mistake. This movie is sexist in a way that would not be acceptable of the gender of the key players were inverted.
Donna's friends were simply loathsome creatures. Screechy without a modicum of musical talent. They were simply there to re-enforce the girl-power message but in being present, they were responsible for butchering some of ABBA's finest tunes.
I was hoping that a movie would remove the flaws of the stage-show and inject a little more believability into any of the characters. This did not happen.
If you love musicals, and if you love ABBA, then give this movie a miss. I love both, but this movie is enough to make you go cold-turkey.