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Someone once said there are two kinds of people in the world: those that like ABBA, and those that like ABBA but won't admit it. Whether or not it is cool to like ABBA, I'll happily admit that I do and - whilst I wasn't crazy enough about them to rush and see the stage show - I had enough interest to see Mamma Mia on opening weekend. Part of the lure was seeing Pierce Brosnan singing, part of the lure was Meryl Streep, but mostly I was there to hear Voluez Vous, Knowing Me Knowing You and Waterloo in glorious Dolby Surround. Why then was I thinking what on earth possessed me just two minutes in?

The stage to screen adaptation of Mamma Mia is overseen by the debut efforts of both the writer and director: Catherine Johnson and Phyllida Lloyd respectively. The basic premise is really a thinly veiled excuse to get a cast singing ABBA's back catalogue but, for what it is worth, a young girl (Amanda Seyfried) invites her mother's 3 ex-boyfriends to her wedding because she believes one of them is her father. The songs are then worked into the storyline like round pegs in square holes, but really this is just an exercise in unashamed high-camp, extreme kitsch nonsense. Whilst this kitschy camp may have been the deliberate aim, it just comes across as badly written, badly lit, badly edited, badly choreographed and, most of all, abysmally directed. The acting is hit and miss, although most of the adults are fine. Indeed I even moderately admired the extent at which Brosnan threw himself into this thing and his scenes were at least quite engaging. Streep was also totally committed and I kept wondering why; I figured they must have paid her a fortune. Julie Walters was just irritating I thought and the less said about the minor characters the better.

Mamma Mia may very well work on stage (I've not seen it) but it doesn't work at all on screen. At least not when directed this ineptly by a first time director and with a crew consisting of first timers, and those whose previous projects include the likes of Basic Instinct 2 and Alien vs Predator (seriously). The writer had never written a screenplay before. The director had only directed on stage before. The cinematographer did Venus, that Peter O'Toole film from 2 years ago that was as appallingly lit as anything I've ever seen. None of this surprised me when I went trawling through IMDb to find out.

Also compare the quality of the lip synching to the songs in this and something like Chicago. Why bother getting characters to break out into song if you can't be bothered to make it look convincing that they have. Streep and co are so obviously lip synching to studio recorded tracks that they may have well as just acted over background songs without bothering to create the illusion of them singing in the scene. The whole approach here just seemed so amateurish when something like Chicago obviously had so much more effort and attention to detail. Clearly Rob Marshall and co were going for something more sophisticated, but there is no excuse for shoddy workmanship and it is all over Mamma Mia. From the bizarre green screen work that causes characters to be standing in front of an obviously fake ocean with the sun permanently creating a halo around their entire body, to embarrassing slow-mo, to the ridiculous camera movements that went out of fashion about a week after someone tried it for the first time 30 years ago, it's all simply woeful.

The thing is, when they break into one of the better ABBA songs you're moderately entertained, but the rest of the time you're desperate to play fast forward and get to Voulez Vous or Waterloo or another decent track they've not sung yet. And then when all is said and done they don't even play Knowing Me Knowing You and you feel even more cheated.

I guess I smiled once or twice. I only laughed once and that was when the credits rolled and Brosnan, Firth and Skarsgard came out in some Glam Rock costumes that were about the only thing in the whole film that the technical department (if we can call it that) got right in the entire picture and performed Waterloo. I'm completely certain 80 minutes of watching the post-credit stuff would have been way more entertaining than a film which, from a technical perspective, is executed as badly as anything you'll see all year.