Sadly*, Mamma Mia looks pretty bad. The film critic for WGN in Chicago this morning really took an axe to it, and showed a clip of Pierce Brosnan crooning opposite Meryl Streep and proving he can’t sing at all. Needless to say, this called to mind (for me, anyway) Timothy Dalton’s infamous “Love Will Keep Us Together” duet with Mae West in Sextette, although as you’d expect Brosnan and Streep at least came out better than those two.
[*I’m being serious, and was half planning to see this. I like musicals, and they don’t make many of them anymore. So when they screw one up like this, it despresses me.]Don’t be fooled by the 48% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, which make this sound like a tepid film instead of a bad one. The ‘good’ reviews very often aren’t half-hearted; they’re quarter-hearted. The negatives reviews, in contrast, as quite energentically so:
“Postive” review: “Stage director Phyllida Lloyd should kneel and kiss the feet of her cast who persist in entertaining us despite every roadblock she throws in their way.”
Negative review: “A party where everyone is so desperate to have a good time that it makes you miserable. ”
“Positive” review: “flash-foiled by motion picture incompetence.”
Negative review: “Mamma Mia! is one of the most awkward, poorly acted and just laughably bad musical’s to date.”
“Postive” review: “Mostly successful [in creating fun], but along the way its strengths struggled mightily against its weaknesses.”
Negative review: “The best things about the film are that the ingenue is a babe, it is 30 minutes than “Sex and the City” and no one sings “Fernando.” Of course, I could say the same things about “Wanted” and that film at least had better choreography.”
