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Here’s a word of warning, leave any shred of serious sensibility at the door for this one because take it from me it won’t survive the unapologetic cornfest that is Mamma Mia!

From a distance, i.e. during the opening credits, Mamma Mia! looks and sounds like quite a entertaining, punchy, bunch of fun. However, fast-forward 108 minutes and you’ll most likely be singing a very different tune. Or at the very least find yourself complaining to your cinema companion that you’ll never again, from this moment on be able to listen to another ABBA track without being haunted by the painfully shrill, Karaokesque attempts of Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan taking a stab at overriding what can only be described as tone deafness. It is my personal opinion that both should seriously consider firing their management teams, because someone in each of their clique’s is an out an out jobs worth and telling them porky pies, the fact of the matter is they can’t sing.

Even though the story is for the most part irrelevant, it would be unfair to say that there is no plotline whatsoever. There is. It is just very skewed and very flimsy. Let me enlighten you, Meryl Streep plays Donna, a woman apparently in her forties but with no disrespect to Streep, doesn’t look far off from her real life fifty nine years. Once a bit of a wild thing in her heyday, she is now a struggling single mother, running a rather glorious albeit rundown B&B in Greece. And the real dramatic cruncher is that her 20-year-old, bride-to-be daughter Sophie has unbeknown to her invited her three potential fathers to the big day. All of which, despite the fact that twenty years has past since their little dalliances, ahem one-night stands with Donna, have decided to drop everything and hop on a plane to Greece. Talk about loyal old flames. Only In the movies, huh?

The lack of story and miscasting is unfortunately not the only malfunction that is Mamma Mia! I know ABBA once crooned, Thank You For The Music but I think they took it a little too far. To offset the fact that the plot is rail thin, director Phyllida Lloyd, a leading UK theatre and opera director, has decided to awkwardly hang just about ever hit that ABBA released so that what it boils down to is a half baked musical soundtrack with very happy looking people bouncing around the screen.

Good points you ask? Well the Greek Island does look beautiful, definitely a postcard for tourism… and there is no denying that the feelgood factor is unrelenting…