The art of making a chick flick is one that is surprisingly difficult to make even and tolerable. The term ‘’chick flick’’ is an overly generalized term that is essentially any film that is mainly for the viewing of young to middle-aged women, mainly having romances and comedies as the key genres of this type. While this concept is a pretty blanket term as nowadays any one of any gender can like any type of film, this term has been given a lot of negativity for every movie under its veil being considered bad, along with the male version which has been recently titled ‘’d**k flicks’’. Both are home to a large variety of awful films due to the ease that they can be created with generic plots, characters, and shallow messages, but they can also be home to good stuff as well. Examples like The Princess Bride, Ever After, Hairspray and Pitch Perfect show that chick flicks can be given a nice sense of humor and dignity as long as it shows respect for its audience. The 2008 film, Mamma Mia is an example that only sees its audiences as mindless animals that can be entertained by anything, and it’s truly awful because of that. On a secluded Greek Island, a girl to be married named Sophie (played by Amanda Seyfried) invites three men to her wedding day; three men that she believes to be her real father. Wary that her mother, Donna (played by Meryl Streep) will find them and send them away, Sophie hides the three men; Harry, Sam, and Bill (played by Colin Firth, Pierce Brosnan, and Stellan Skarsgard) and keeps their possible parental connection a secret in hopes of finding out which one is the one before her big day. After Donna discovers they’ve return and starts to spiral out of control, this drama on top of Sophie’s life coming to the surface will result in some forceful situations that will need to be resolved before the soon-to-be newlyweds can say ”I Do”. Based on the jukebox musical of the same name written by British playwright Catherine Johnson and taking songs from the Swedish pop band, ABBA, Mamma Mia does not only feature every terrible thing that can be done with a musical, but it also has the gall to feature every terrible thing that can be in a chick flick. It is a pandering, mindless, shallow, annoying drivel of a film that feigns ignorance due to being a chick flick, as opposed to admitting its horrible elements.

Taking its source material from a stage play is already a dangerous thing to do for a movie as a stage play’s strength does not come in its plot, but rather in its scale, production, and quality of effort put into it. Realizing this, it becomes clear why the story is as shallow and minimal as a film could possibly be. The brief description about the parentage drama is the only shred of a plot that comes from this movie, the rest is filled with nothing but screeching, giggling, drinking and every stereotypical thing that people think woman do. This movie feels unbelievably insulting to its own demographic; not trying to give it something intelligent or well thought-out, but rather an experience that parades as being for woman while giving nothing worth remembering. A movie does not need to challenge its audience or even be anything that ground-breaking, but the worse thing a film can be to its audience is demeaning; when it views them in a way where they cannot handle anything of quality. That is what this movie feels like, something that would be put on in the background and casually talked over as opposed to actually viewing it. The writing for the film by Catherine Johnson is so annoying predictable and shallow and the characters are made to be so stupid, annoying, and stereotypical that it always feels below its audience and never tries to be anything other than what it thinks woman would like. It’s hard to care about a romance when the characters are nothing but shouting shallow people that have no character traits outside of screaming with girly cheers, and the comedy doesn’t work when even if there’s a legitimate good set-up, the pay-off is always the same, giggling and shouting. What’s strange is that the director of this film, Phyllida Lloyd, would go on to direct The Iron Lady, which is a far superior film and shows that this director does have talent and knows how to construct a female-driven story, so it honestly just feels like someone struggling with a garbage script.

The characters in this film are already so shallowly created that not only are they insanely unlikeable, bland, and unbelievably stupid, but they also mirror tropes of terrible chick flicks that make them even more insufferable. The ladies are all crazy dummies, and the men are equally as bland, only really being used as eye candy for the film. It does the generous thing of insulting both genders by portraying them both as shallow husks of what they’re depicted to be in media, rather than what they actually are. Sophie’s insane plan as well as her idiotic response to what should be an obvious problem makes her very unsympathetic and annoyingly stupid, Donna comes off as very sporadic as her mood seems to be solely dictated by the musical numbers, the three fathers are about as complex as sitcom characters, and every side character has no sense of personality whatsoever, only used as time wasters to pad out a film with no story. The acting from everybody is not technically awful as the film is surprisingly stacked with a solid cast, but it all feels wildly uncoordinated, like they were drunk on-set and just having fun with a ridiculous story and script and didn’t even try to milk something of worth of what they felt would be an easy success due to its musical origins. Whether it’s true or not, it gives off that feeling where even its own cast is not taking the material seriously. This film is packed with famous names that not only do not work in a location that should be filled with Greek actors, but with how little material they can work with, their performances can only come across as annoying. The only semblance of Greek actors utilized in the film are for choruses or extras in the background, not a horrible issue with the film but feels like a massive waste of a lot of talent that could have been utilized as opposed to relying on star power, but considering how these roles are written and directed, maybe it’s for the best that they weren’t left out to the wolves.

A musical can often times count on its song numbers to keep people invested, and jukebox musicals (which is a musical using songs from pop culture in order to tell their story) often have a harder time working them into their productions as they aren’t songs created specifically for the plot, where they can be more specific towards what’s going on. Instead of using the songs to further their own created story (which even something like Moulin Rouge got right), this movie instead feels like its picking out songs from ABBA and haphazardly trying to piece together a story out of those numbers. ABBA are a very famous pop band, and they are home to a few catchy songs, but the music works much better as simple jams to listen to on the radio, not for a feature-length musical. So many song numbers in this film could be taken out and nothing would change overall; they are only there so that they can squeeze out as many ABBA songs as they want and pull in obsessed fans who don’t care about whether or not the film entertains, but only that they perform their favourite number. Even taking out how unfitting these songs numbers are, the singing for them is equally as shaky. Almost all of the actors in this film aren’t professionally trained and that shows when they perform their songs; with people like Pierce Brosnan being very flat and out of key, Meryl Streep being fine enough but is clearly struggling with singing musically, and the rest either sounding off-key or just bland. The one shinnying grace that this film has is the location that it shot at was at an actual Greek Island and it’s a very nice-looking location; with pristine water, stone-like architecture, wonderful clear skylines with great sunsets, large mountainsides and an overall humble nature that feels incredibly simple and beautiful at the same time.

A chick flick is not automatically going to be a bad movie. Movies specifically made for one gender is not quite as black and white as it was perceived as originally, but they still hold certain types and clichés that work more for one side than the other. But that does not mean that either are not home to some entertaining movies that can be enjoyed by either gender regardless. Mamma Mia is the staple that people think of when they think of a bad chick flick; no thought, no subtlety, no sense of purpose or restraint, no respect for its audience, and nothing but the lowest common denominator of what makes a rom-com watchable. It fails on a musical level with pointless music with shaky unprofessional vocals, it fails as a romantic comedy as its nothing but loud obnoxious dumb characters doing ridiculously stupid things that the movie pretends is casual because ‘’they’re chicks’’, and it fails as a chick flick because instead of giving them a positive fantasy of empowerment and success, it gives them a shallow undertaking that only degrades them. Women deserve better than this movie and deserve a film that can make them laugh and cry, but one that does it for the right reasons.

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