Mamma Mia!

Rating

Director

Phyllida Lloyd

Screenplay

Catherine Johnson

Length

1h 48m

Starring

Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried, Christine Baranski, Julie Walters, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgård, Dominic Cooper, Niall Buggy, Chris Jarvis, Ashley Lilley, Rachel McDowall, Philip Michael, Juan Pablo Di Pace, Enzo Squillino, Ricardo Montez

MPAA Rating

PG-13

Original Preview

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Review

ABBA is the quintessential disco group that delivered some of the most familiar and memorable dance tracks of the 1970s and early 1980s. As part of the Jukebox Musical trend that took Broadway by storm and continues to entrance it, it should surprise no one that the celebrated musical Mamma Mia! has made a transfer to the big screen and that’s not a decision for the better.

Starring Meryl Streep as middle-aged mother Donna raising her daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) alone, Sophie is preparing to marry and invites the three men her mother slept with to see if she can uncover which of them may be her father. When the three show up (Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, and Stellan Skarsgärd), Sophie wants answers while her mother tries to find a way to get rid of them.

Co-starring Christine Baranski, Julie Walters, and Dominic Cooper, the stage-to-screen adaptation may be set on a Greek island, but it often feels like it’s cobbled together on a poorly lit sound stage with cheap backdrops and the occasional remote filming session. Streep is frantic and disorienting in her passable vocal renderings, feeling more out of place than she ever has (and that includes her underwhelming performance in Into the Woods). Baranski and Walter try to enjoy themselves, but their clunky dialogue and staging is completely unflattering. The less said about the awful musical talents of Brosnan, Firth, and Skarsgärd the better.

Director Phyllida Lloyd (not to be confused with actor Phyllida Law) had only two credits to her name prior to helming this miserable adaptation, a forgotten short film from a decade earlier and and mediocrely received TV movie eight years before. Although her experience of directing stage performances for exhibition on the small screen may seem like adequate prep for a production such as this, her inexperience was evident throughout. Finding talented vocal performers who can also act is important for a production like this and instead picking people with thin, reedy voices or lacking in “stage presence” is a disservice to material that is already rife with implausible situations and strained lyrical interpretation. This is most certainly not a production for an inexperienced director and that becomes obvious early on and throughout.

What feels like a film made on a dare or for the actors for a paycheck, Mamma Mia! tried desperately to cash in on the stage musical’s success, but the end result is a haphazard, dull, frustrating affair with plenty of the ABBA music we love without any of the emotional resonance of the pieces themselves. While this kind of material might be sensational on a live stage, on the big screen it’s cluttered and clumsy without a suitable sense of style, presence, grandeur, or excitement.

Review Written

October 21, 2026