Okay, show of hands, who here likes ABBA? Don't pretend that you don't, and if you do in fact not like ABBA, then turn in your music fan card now. The movie in question is Mamma Mia!, and it is based off of the Broadway play of the same name. As you can guess from the movie title, it is heavy on ABBA references, even going as far as incorporating songs from the band into the movie. As for the premise of the movie, a young woman (Amanda Seyfried) is about to get married, but does not know who her father is, so after leafing through her mother's (Meryl Streep) diary, she sends out invites to three men who could be her father (Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgard, and Colin Firth). This is unbeknownst to her mother, who as you can imagine, is less than pleased to see all three men that were once in her life. Of course, the fun ensues and you can imagine how this romantic comedy goes.
The plot itself is cliched on some level, but it serves more as a complimentary piece to the ABBA theme. The songs picked for the movie obviously had to fit into the story, and many of them work, though you would have to be a big ABBA fan to recognize a few of them. The people cast into the movie had to be able to sing, and for the most part, it succeeds on that level, though I would have liked to have seen some better casting choices (it's nitpicking here). The DVD has a sing-along option, which puts up the words to the songs on the screen, so if you want to sing along, it's there for you. Overall, it's not a masterpiece, but it's main purpose is to provide a fun movie that you can participate in, and that is where Mamma Mia! succeeds on every level.
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