Mamma Mia! (PG)

For all I know, Mamma Mia! may be a terrific night out for all the family.

On a Friday night in a crowded cinema, with a decent proportion of children and the mildly inebriate, and it seems perfectly plausible that you will have a great time. Unfortunately, I saw it in circumstances particularly unconducive to suspension of the critical faculties – a cold and wet Monday morning in a large, mostly empty auditorium, the audience consisting of critics who are for the most part even more jaded than I am. And, in the cold light of day, it looked like absolute cack.

How could a beloved stage musical make such an unimpressive film? The answer consists of three words – "beloved", "stage" and "musical". Theatre is a collusive art-form – the audience colludes with the actors, and its reaction becomes part of the performance – which means that things that objectively are unbelievable can be swallowed whole; incredibility even becomes part of the fun.

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Film puts a distance between actors and audience, even as it offers a far closer focus on what the actors are doing, and because of that it has a built-in bias towards naturalism.

The film is directed by Phyllida Lloyd, who staged the original West End production and who has never directed a feature film before; lacking any developed sense of what is inevitably lost in the shift to the screen, or what might be gained, she seems to have fallen back on the elements that made it beloved in the theatre. Result: silliness unredeemed by wit or polish.

Much of the trouble lies with the source material. Whatever else you say about Abba, they did turn out some damnably hummable tunes, but the words didn't always live up to them. Here, they have to carry burdens – a plot, highly specific emotions – that they can't cope with. The problem pops up early on as young Sophia (a pretty but dull Amanda Seyfried) lays out the plot for her friends: brought up by her mother, Donna (Meryl Streep) in the hotel she runs on a remote and beautiful Greek island, Sophia has never known who her father is. On the eve of her wedding, she read Donna's diary and worked out that it must be either Sam (Pierce Brosnan), Harry (Colin Firth) or Bill (Stellan Skarsgard).

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Convinced that she'll know him if she sees him, she has invited all three to the wedding. A montage shows the three receiving their invitations, and speeding Greece-wards. To emphasise the haste, you hear a succession of rushing up-and-down glissandos – the opening to "Gimme Gimme Gimme": what does finding a man after midnight have to do with this?

What follows is all amiable farce, close in tone to the Cliff Richard vehicle Summer Holiday, though lacking that film's tight narrative and political edge. The fathers turn up, are unsuccessfully concealed from Donna, engage in a little friendly rivalry, feel paternal and romantic stirrings. Donna gets emotional, has to be comforted by her best friends, Rosie and Tanya (Julie Walters and Christine Baranski), and realises that she still carries a torch for one of the men. There is some dancing on the beach, and a hen party that turns quite Bacchanalian. Amanda and her fiancé, Sky (Dominic Cooper, of The History Boys), have a crisis. And everything is resolved more or less satisfactorily, though I still don't know why Firth's character suddenly turns out to be gay.

Pre-publicity has emphasised Streep's unbuttoned, full-throated performance, and it's true that she throws herself into the singing and dancing. But this isn't necessarily a good thing. Her rendition of "The Winner Takes It All", for instance, is genuinely extraordinary, full of nuances of deep feeling; but it makes everything around it look silly and shallow. It didn't make me think, "gosh, Streep's all warm and passionate under that chilly, over-intellectual exterior". It made me think, "how come Streep doesn't get meaty dramatic starring roles any more?"

Elsewhere, the choreography is often perfunctory – a yacht-based fantasy sequence for "Money, Money, Money" boils down to a bunch of extras in sailor suits saluting in unison: Lloyd should watch Busby Berkeley's work in Gold Diggers of 1933 to see how it's done.

And the pervading boosterism for sexual liberation is spoiled when the Walters character, having taken a shine to the Skarsgard character, sashays down the table at the climactic wedding banquet, singing "Take a Chance on Me". Maybe this is meant to look empowering, the woman taking the initiative and all, but Skarsgard's panicked flight put me in mind of the man-chasing harpies of Carry On films.