Mama Mia! (2008)

Oh, the modern movie-musical. It seems that this genre has been hit or miss for quite some time. This is easy to understand because it is very easy go wrong with adapting a popular Broadway hit. You can make the film too much like the stage production and appear stagey and gimmicky or you can take too many artistic liberties and risks, drawing the ire of loyalists and getting “too weird” for general audiences. Somewhere in the middle lies the elusive perfect combination of the two. Mama Mia! does not fall into any of these categories.

The subject matter of Mama Mia! is tame stuff when compared to some of the more dramatic productions Broadway has churned out in the past. Young Sophie Sheridan (Amanda Seyfried) is getting married and she wants her father to walk her down the aisle. There is just one small problem with this- she doesn’t know who her father is. After snooping through her mother’s old diary, she narrows her search down to three possible candidates and invites all of them to her wedding in the hopes of sorting it out before the ceremony without her mother finding out. The men arrive earlier than expected and are surprised to learn that they are all possibly the bride’s father. Sophie’s mother (Meryl Streep) is equally surprised when she is confronted with her three former lovers.

All of this is set to the disco-tastic music of ABBA. Some songs work better than others but, on the whole, it’s rather evident that the songs were inserted around the story or the story written specifically with a song in mind. Some of the musical numbers feel more forced than others and the musical as a whole feels more manufactured than organic. Such seems to be the case with so-called ‘jukebox musicals.’ Interestingly enough, two former members of ABBA wrote the stage musical. This solidifies my belief that musicians should stick to what they’re best at.

To be fair, Mama Mia! isn’t a bad musical. In fact, it’s good to the point of entertaining you with jokes and songs aplenty. The downside is that this is a very safe production. It rarely makes you think and doesn’t make much of a statement about anything. Movie-musicals don’t necessarily have to do any of these things but I enjoy it when they do. Mama Mia! is pure sugar frosting. Nothing dynamic; nothing powerful. Just a cute, harmless puff piece that occupies less than two hours of your time.

Seyfried is charming as Sophie and really portrays the innocence of the character well. Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgård and Colin Firth provide plenty of give and take humor as Sophie’s three befuddled potential fathers. As long as one of these three is on screen, Mama Mia! is at its funniest. Meryl Streep works as Sophie’s quasi-scatter brained mother but her two friends (Julie Walters and Christine Baranski) have a tendency to go over the top. Maybe I feel this way because I am a man and don’t appreciate catty, corny female humor as much as others, but the women of Mama Mia! had me rolling my eyes more than rolling on the floor.

Simply put, you could do a lot worse than Mama Mia! It gets the job done in that it entertains you and doesn’t drag on in too many places. This easy, breezy aspect comes at a price though- the film never really leaves its mark on you. Fun and forgettable is fine because it is fun. But it is still forgettable.

RATING: 3 out of 5