Now here’s a genre that someone should have strangled in the crib: the song catalogue musical. These are musicals where, instead of writing your own songs, you use the best known work of a single popular artist of the recent past. In the case of Mamma Mia, it’s Abba. Here’s why this is an awful idea; songs like this were never intended to be used to tell a coherent narrative story and so the music ends up being these unrelated diversions from the main plot which in turn has to become as thin and sitcomish as possible in order to accommodate the music. Yep, it’s a vicious circle of the incompatible trying to be well-matched with the incompatible. Take That can’t do it, Queen can’t do it and Abba really cannot do it. This needs to stop now before the west end finds itself underneath the dark cloud of “Lloyd Webber’s ‘Fade to Black’, the tender story of a boy, a girl, a dream and a dying love set to the timeless melodies of Metallica”.
2008 will probably end up being the year the chic flick blockbuster came into its own and learnt to suck just as much as the male blockbusters. See, there’s always been an uneasy truce between ‘gender cinema’. Guy movies were bigger cash cows whilst chick flicks got the distinction of being better films on average via the reliance on script overbudget guaranteeing even the worst of the female films will be better than the worst of the guy movies. In 2008 that’s all ended with the dual smash successes of the illogical ‘Sex and The City’ and now the pathetic ‘Mammia Mia’- two movies so shallow, so base and so hinged on meaningless spectacle it’s amazing they weren’t made for men.
For me, the main reason to see this movie was to try and get an understanding on what the Italian exclamation 'Mamma Mia' actually means. Obviously it seems to translate into 'my mother' or 'mother of mine' but then why does it seem to be used as a term for ‘holy shit’ whenever you hear it? I always assumed it was a Vatican thing; their own version of yelling ‘Jesus Christ!’ However, if the film is to be taken as an accurate representation of the said definition, it seems the term more precisely means ‘Surprise! Your mother’s a whore!’
That’s actually the story of the movie. An about to be married girl who has grown up all her life on a Greek holiday resort (run by her single mother) never got a straight answer to who her father was. Upon reading her mothers diary she finds out why. About the time she was conceived her mother was getting her chimney swept by three different dudes, all of whom could be the potential papa. Ode to finding out that her existence is nothing but the result of a Mediterranean bookaki ritual the girl continues to be peppy and happy. In a hope to find a resolution she invites all three men to the wedding under false pretences…and then they show up! Uh oh, they don’t know which one’s the real dad! Uh oh, she didn’t tell her mother they were coming! Uh oh, mum doesn’t know which one is the father either! Hilarity ensues!
And now we’re back to the main problem. This isn’t the plot of a feature film or a West End show… it’s the back story to an indie sitcom or Little Britain Sketch. In-between the otherwise good actors being forced to belt out Abba covers there’s barely fifteen minutes of a movie in here! It’s really sloppy and fake looking too: most of it takes place in front of sound stages and obvious green-screen and bad green-screen really pisses me off! As a creature of the cinema, I get really excited when I recognise the use of green-screen because I think it’s going to be filled with Zeus or Gollum or something. Here it’s filled with a troop of colourful locals who provide the backing vocals…a Greek chorus! Get it?
It’s cheap, it’s clumsy, the story is not very good, the actors look lost and the covers are awful…and I’m an Abba fan! Well, there is one exception: at some point near the end the movie remembers it’s supposed to be about the relationship between mother and daughter and how it has changed and grown through the stories revelations. We get this wedding prep scene where they are singing ‘Slipping through my fingers’ and, well, given the song and context and delivery it’s incredibly moving. Seeing as the rest of the movie is nothing but a big, soulless void… the sincerity of it hits you like an anvil. It’s really sad. How sad? Imagine a terminally ill six year old boy singing puff the magic dragon…at a funeral…for his puppy…which died on 9/11. Close to that. It’s such a good number and I was so moved that I actually became angry at it- I had so much pleasure hating the movie that I didn’t want it to transform into something good and destroy my fun. Fortunately, the song ended and the film got right back to sucking, so it was all right.
Bottom line: this is a bad, bad, bad movie. It’s suitable only for uses in interrogation technique or if you really want to hear James Bond sing…terribly.