Mamma Mia Here We Go Again Ny Times Review

Motion-picture show Review | 'Mamma Mia!'

Does Your Female parent Know Yous Sing Abba Tunes?

Credit... Peter Mountain/Universal Pictures

Mamma Mia!

Directed by Phyllida Lloyd

Comedy, Musical, Romance

PG-13

1h 48m

• July 18, 2008

Fifty-fifty those of united states of america who habitually favor serious, ascetic, aesthetically correct drinks — single-malt Scotch, green tea, pomegranate juice, whatever — may occasionally indulge in a frivolous cocktail bedecked with fruit and umbrellas and served in a bulbous, carbohydrate-rimmed glass. The next morning's headache seems a small price to pay for the blitz of cheap liquor and uninhibited conviviality. As long as you don't operate heavy mechanism or wake upwards in the wrong bed, or operate heavy machinery in the wrong bed, what's the impairment?

All of which is to say: Don't be agape of "Mamma Mia!" (That exclamation bespeak, by the way, is role of the title, and it's past far the most understated thing about the movie.) Y'all can take a perfectly squeamish time watching this spirited adaptation of the pop stage musical and, once the hangover wears off, acknowledge just how bad it is.

Really you don't have much choice on either front. If you insist on folding your arms, looking at your sentinel and defending yourself against this mindless, hedonistic assault on coherence, you are unlikely to survive until the end credits (which may, past themselves, kill y'all all over over again). Surrender, on the other hand, is piece of cake and painless. It's Greece! It's bellybuttons! It's Meryl Streep! Information technology'due south Abba!

Run into that daughter! Lookout that scene! If you change your heed, I'chiliad the first in line. Mamma Mia, here I go again. Like me, you may have spent the last thirty years struggling to become lines like those out of your head — and wondering what they were doing there in the first place — but you might equally well have been trying to compost Styrofoam. Those shimmery, layered arrangements, those lyrics in a language uncannily like English, those symmetrical Nordic voices — they all add up to something alarmingly permanent, a marshmallow monument on the cultural mural. When our species dies out, leaving the planet to roaches and robots, the insects volition beat their trivial wings to the melody of "Waterloo" as Wall-Eastward and Eve warble along.

And the darn matter still won't make any sense. Nor does "Mamma Mia!," but that'southward hardly a criticism. The story (by Catherine Johnson) is more than or less an early Shakespeare comedy reimagined as an episode of "Hannah Montana." The ingénue, Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), is about to be married on the sun-drenched Greek island where she lives with her mother, Donna (Ms. Streep). Sophie is the only-ripe fruit of a summer fling, with the complicating factor that Donna had three flings during the summer in question, and Sophie doesn't know whether her dad is Sam (Pierce Brosnan), Bill (Stellan Skarsgard) or Harry (Colin Firth). But even though she knows them but equally names in an onetime diary, she manages to track them down and invite all three to her hymeneals. Lo and behold, they all show upward, equally do Tanya (Christine Baranski) and Rosie (Julie Walters), sometime pals of Donna'southward from the crazy days of her rock 'n' roll youth.

But when, exactly, those crazy days were is a bit vague. A song lyric refers to the "time of the Bloom Power." (Surely you remember the Flower Power!) Just Sophie sure doesn't expect twoscore. At i betoken, Harry recalls the Johnny Rotten T-shirt he had back when he knew Donna, which is 10 years closer to the mark but yet about ten years off. Never mind. Abba is timeless: "The history book up on my shelf/ is e'er repeating itself."

The existent problem is that the director of "Mamma Mia!," Phyllida Lloyd, seems accept taken the unapologetic silliness of the project (which she directed onstage) as permission to be sloppy. Abba made some of the most highly polished, tightly engineered pop junk always. There is a kind of perfection in some of those hits that is undeniable even if — or maybe especially if — you can't stand to hear them. But in matters of arts and crafts and technique "Mamma Mia!" proves to be remarkably shoddy, a tangle of impuissant cuts, mismatched shots, bad lighting, egregious overdubbing and scenes in which characters announced to have been haphazardly Photoshopped into the scenery.

It is safe to say that Ms. Streep gives the worst performance of her career — safe to say because it is so clearly what she intends, and she is not an actress capable of failure. At that place is a caste of fascination in watching an Oscar-winning Yale School of Drama graduate mug and squirm, shimmy and shriek and generally fill every moment with antic, purposeless free energy, every bit if she were hogging the spotlight in an eighth-grade musical.

She is saved, and as well upstaged, past Ms. Walters and, especially, past Ms. Baranski, whose cougar-on-the-prowl rendition of "Does Your Mother Know" is the one genuinely, prove-stoppingly sexy sequence in a movie that more ofttimes flails between forced cheekiness and unearned sentiment.

I know: I promised you a practiced time, and I'g describing a train wreck. Only it's hard not to share the evident delight of most of the performers. Ms. Streep overdoes it, yes, only yous can't accuse her of cavalier to the material whatsoever more than you tin can mistake her for taking it also seriously.

The impression left by the old pros who make upwards well-nigh of the cast is that they have nothing to exist ashamed of and nothing to prove, and that worrying most dignity is for newbies and amateurs. And so Mr. Brosnan bellows his way through a couple of duets, Mr. Skarsgard displays his tattooed buttocks, and Mr. Firth consents to appear in a spiked dog collar.

Ms. Seyfried has a harder time, though not for any lack of effort or talent. She has to work while the old timers are having fun, and to carry the picture'south unconvincing, flat-footed attempts at melodrama. Ms. Seyfried's eyes are equally blue as the Aegean and almost as wide, and her natural vivacity makes her functioning seem near authentic, but she'southward not in a position to let get of her vanity and clown around.

It's i thing to ham it upward in a zany, messy musical if you're the actual Meryl Streep. If you take the desire (or the potential) to be the side by side Meryl Streep, the stakes are college and the risks more pronounced.

Simply Ms. Seyfried, who has proven her skill on "Large Love" and elsewhere, is probable to emerge from "Mamma Mia!" unscathed. Really, this movie is incapable of harming anyone, except moviegoers with the skilful taste and bad manners to resist its relentless, ridiculous charm.

"Mamma Mia!" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some sexual references and sexy behavior.

MAMMA MIA!

Opens on Fri nationwide.

Directed past Phyllida Lloyd; written by Catherine Johnson, based on the original musical volume by Ms. Johnson, originally conceived by Judy Craymer based on the songs of Abba; director of photography, Haris Zambarloukos; edited by Lesley Walker; music and lyrics past Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, some songs with Stig Anderson; choreographer, Anthony Van Laast; product designer, Maria Djurkovic; produced by Ms. Craymer and Gary Goetzman; released by Universal Pictures. Running time: i hour 48 minutes.

WITH: Meryl Streep (Donna), Pierce Brosnan (Sam), Colin Firth (Harry), Stellan Skarsgard (Beak), Julie Walters (Rosie), Dominic Cooper (Sky), Amanda Seyfried (Sophie) and Christine Baranski (Tanya).

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/18/movies/18mamm.html

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