Like many people, I was under the impression that the new Meryl Streep film was called “Mamma Mia.” The correct title is, in fact, “Mamma Mia!,” and, in one keystroke, the exclamation mark tells you all you need to know about the movie. Billy Wilder tried the same trick with “Avanti!,” in 1972, but that felt like late Chekhov compared with this ferocious onslaught of obligatory good cheer. From the opening minutes, in which Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), a young pleasure seeker on the eve of her wedding, greets her two bridesmaids as they arrive on a jetty, yelping with delight like unweaned puppies, you can tell that everyone in this story is just going to have the best time. Ever.

Hazard of the modern musical: Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan on a Greek island, singing the Abba songbook. Illustration by Robert Risko

Sophie resides on a Greek island—an island like any other, where gnarled old ladies drop whatever they’re doing in the olive grove and tunefully join in on nineteen-seventies Swedish pop songs. She lives there with her mother, Donna (Meryl Streep), who has been running a shabby hotel for many years, and who wears dungarees to signal her lack of reliance on a man. Long ago, however, there were plenty of men; one crazy summer, in particular, provided three in a row. Any one of them could have been the father of Sophie, and she, needing somebody to walk her down the aisle, has invited all three contenders to the wedding: Sam (Pierce Brosnan), Harry (Colin Firth), and Bill (Stellan Skarsgård). Little do they suspect the horrors that lie in store.

The script is by Catherine Johnson, who also wrote the stage play on which it is based, although “play” may not be the word. It was more like a theatrical kebab, onto which she skewered as many Abba songs as humanly possible: a clever move, given that half the people in the Western world have the Abba sound stuck itchily in their ears, whether they like it or not. The show has proved an international wow, so much so that, rather than being subtly adapted for the screen, it has been hauled there pretty much intact—along with the director, Phyllida Lloyd, who oversaw the original London production, and who has never directed a feature film before. How else does one explain the theatrical quality of the light on the terrace of Donna’s hotel, which has a curious apricot glaze, bearing no relation to the bright, breathable atmosphere of any known Greek island? The credits insist that “Mamma Mia!” was filmed on Skiathos and Skopelos, yet even the exteriors have the feel of interiors, with both leads and locals behaving in ways that seem not so much clichéd as marked out and preordained. It’s like the Hellenic answer to “The Truman Show.”

To an extent, this is a hazard of the modern musical. As audiences, we have long since fallen from that state of grace in which the sight of Debbie Reynolds bidding “Good morning” to Gene Kelly in song rather than in speech struck us as a natural option. Any attempt to regain that paradise is doomed to falter. When Julie Walters—playing a boozy friend of Donna’s, asked along to the jamboree—suddenly declares, “If you change your mind,” to Stellan Skarsgård, we laugh at her presumption, though ours is not the laughter of innocence but the inferior laughter of knowingness. We recognize the first line of Abba’s “Take a Chance on Me” and duly adopt the brace position, steadying ourselves for yet another mangling of yet another hit.

The legal definition of torture has been much aired in recent years, and I take “Mamma Mia!” to be a useful contribution to that debate. In a way, the whole film is a startling twist on the black art of rendition: ordinary citizens, often unaware of their own guilt, are spirited off to a secure environment in Eastern Europe, there to be forced into a humiliating and often painful confession of sins past. “I tried to reach for you, but you have closed your mind,” in the bitter words of Sam. I thought that Pierce Brosnan had been dragged to the edge of endurance by North Korean sadists in his final Bond film, “Die Another Day,” but that was a quick tickle with a feather duster compared with the agony of singing Abba’s “S.O.S.” to Meryl Streep through a kitchen window. Somebody, either a cheeky Swede or another North Korean, has deliberately scored the number a tone and a half too high, with visible results: swelling muscles along the jawline, tightened throat, a panicky bulge in the eyes. There is no delicate way of putting this, but anyone watching Brosnan in mid-delivery will conclude that he has recently suffered from a series of complex digestive problems, and that the camera has, with unfortunate timing, caught him at the exact moment when he is finally working them out. What has he done to deserve this?

His only crime, in truth, is that of being a good sport. If you are an old pro at song-and-dance routines, then “Mamma Mia!” will go like a breeze—as it does for Christine Baranski, who rolls up as Donna’s wicked pal, and whose lusty, beach-bound version of “Does Your Mother Know?” shames the rest of the movie. If, on the other hand, you are a cautious and reactive performer, like Brosnan or Firth (or like Streep herself, the mistress of watchfulness), you grab any chance to cut loose. Streep has tried this before, with “Death Becomes Her” and “Postcards from the Edge,” but I am not convinced, on the strength of the new film, that life becomes her—not this relaxed brand of life, at any rate, which entails bouncing on the bed and strapping herself into thigh-high platform boots. If this great actress is unconvincing as an old hippie, it’s because none of us can believe she was ever a young hippie. How, we want to know, did the French Lieutenant’s Woman wind up jumping off the dock of the bay?

There are, to be fair, millions of viewers who will relish the sheer unlikelihood of all this. They will cheer on the actors’ warbled singing, and the hobbled-donkey style of dancing, precisely because it is so amateur and shambolic—because, in short, it reminds them of themselves having a good time. I wish I could share that contagion, but then I really saw only half the movie, having spent the other half staring down at my clenched fists and curled toes in a calvary of embarrassment. This has nothing to do with Abba, the most hook-infested Euro pop ever devised, and I was perfectly happy—well, happy—to sit through the stage show of “Mamma Mia!” Other films, moreover, have proved surprisingly hospitable to Abba; listen to the use of “Dancing Queen” in “Muriel’s Wedding” (1994), or to a Brosnan-free “S.O.S.” at the end of the Swedish masterpiece “Together” (2000), and marvel at the force of emotion that can be wrung from the higher cheesiness. All credit to Phyllida Lloyd, then, for piling on the songs, sometimes with barely a break; the trouble is that, being in proud possession of a camera, she will insist on sticking it in people’s faces as they croon. Study any of the classic musicals, and you see how they pull away from head shots and become meditations on bodies in space and voices on the move, whereas Meryl Streep, given a windy cliff top, a red silk wrap, and “The Winner Takes It All,” is obliged to hold still and belt it out like Cassandra calling down ruin on Troy. And poor Brosnan (him again) has to stand in the blast area and listen to her at a distance of eighteen inches, rubbing his chin thoughtfully as if to check when he last shaved.

From there we hop to the climax, to the resolution of Sophie’s filial quandary, and to the unheralded revelation that one of her putative fathers may be gay. Just to blur the issue, all three of them proceed to sport multicolored Lurex pants during the final credits, the better to launch into “Waterloo”—the song no plot could contain. Be warned, though: you also have to watch Streep march to the front of the screen, as if to invisible footlights, and scream at us, “Do you want more?” “Thank you, but no,” I replied, as politely as I could, but I don’t think she heard. Everybody around me was screaming back. They wanted more.

Only in selected cinemas will “Journey to the Center of the Earth” be available in 3-D. Those condemned to view it in two dimensions will be left in mild bewilderment, since many details have been selected for no purpose other than the flaunting of three-dimensional oomph. A trilobitic bug scurries on at the start and waves its enormous feelers in our direction. That, however, is the extent of its performance, and the bug might wonder, like an ingénue asked to remove her clothes, if such exposure was artistically justified. Next up are the yo-yo and the tape measure, both of which come zooming out of the screen, and I can’t help thinking of other films that would have been improved by a blast of 3-D; I might not have nodded off during “The Hours,” for example, if regularly prodded awake by the giant schnozzle of Virginia Woolf.

Brendan Fraser plays a modern-day professor named Trevor, who descends, via a volcano, into the planet’s guts, together with Sean (Josh Hutcherson), his nephew, and Hannah (Anita Briem), just the sort of unattached blond Icelandic tour guide you need in these situations. What ensues is closer to a theme ride than to a motion picture, and its dips into pensive emotion are a waste of footage. Nobody, but nobody, in the audience will care as much about the professor’s dead brother as about the live T. rex. Yet most of the movie, directed by Eric Brevig, is as daft, outlandish, and speedy as it needs to be, and, for all its newfangled effects, touchingly old-fashioned in its reverence for the Jules Verne novel that inspired it. “It’s all in the book!” the professor cries. When did you last hear that at a theme park? ♦