It's so shiny and colorful and they sing ABBA songs and that's pretty much it. I think it got me high. I think it should be administered to patients with seasonal affective disorder. I rented it because it was 75 cents! I might watch it again someday, or I'll just watch a puppy climb out of a basket or a kitten play with a piece of string. [Entry 13 Birthday CD Movie Crawl 02.28.2009]
A feel good movie which can't help but bring a smile to your face! The Waterloo sequence at the end really made me want to start dancing in the theatre! The cast is delightful and likeable and the music was done justice (Sorry Pierce...singing's just not your forte). That was 2 hours of my life I didn't regret.
Mostly good parts but Streep should have bowed out for someone younger who could sing and dance better, and Brosnan's singing was embarrassing (love him to death otherwise), but fortunately he doesn't sing too often. Why didn't they at least dub their voices? If Clooney could be dubbed for O Brother! so too could she.
I can't help but rate this much higher than it deserves; I loved it. Does the source songs greater justice than I expected. Great performances. The female trio is incredible, with Meryl Streep delivering a stellar performance. Anything that has an ex-James Bond singing and dancing in a shiny blue suit I cannot fault. It's too good. I must condone it. Campy? Cliched? Yes. But it's a musical! It's supposed to be. I enjoyed this immensly, and I'm not even an ABBA fan. Alas, the end is pretty poor.
I get the appeal, I get the concept, I get the music. What I don't get is how such a well-loved musical could be so terribly miscast and miss-directed. Meryl Streep is fine, but Pierce Brosnan is a joke, as is Colin Firth (literally), and pretty much everything else about this.
It's mindless fun, and I like it! The downside: I'm aware it's a musical, but sometimes there are WAY too many songs one after another - it feels like a CD playing, not a film.
It was nice that they recruited the stage director of Mamma Mia! to make her feature film debut with the bigscreen version of jukebox musical sensation. Maybe someone should have first determined whether or not she had any flair for working in the very different medium. The film is horribly clumsy, all jump zooms and painful clowning. The ABBA songs are wedged in haphazardly and often sung with with so much vigor by the actors that it starts to come across as a weirdly catchy form of aggression.
Despite surprisingly good performances from Streep and Seyfreid, and despite the occasional funny we-know-this-is-stupid-but-it's-a-musical-dammit! gags, this musical-turned-movie is far too long (even though it's under 2 hours) and the stupidity of the characters is unbelievable even for the campy shlock it is.
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