Pitch
Perfect 2
I didn’t like the first one, and I don’t like this
one. You have been warned.
The Barden Bellas are back, and, just when they should be riding high
and enjoying their stunning rise to prominence, disaster strikes.
During a performance for President Obama at The Kennedy Center, Amy
(Rebel Wilson) has a wardrobe malfunction, which exposes her lady parts
to the entire audience.
Due to causing so much embarrassment and scandal, the group is
suspended from a cappella competition, but, because of a loophole, they
are still slated to represent America at the international competition
in Copenhagen.
If The Bellas can become the first American group to win, they will be
allowed to continue as a sanctioned a cappella group.
If they fail, it is the end of The Bellas (it’s also the end
if the movie fails to gross enough money, but let’s not bring
reality into this discussion).
Will The Bellas
impress the international audience, or will they fall to the superior
German team?
Director Elizabeth Banks and writer Kay Cannon are trying to force too
much. Instead of telling a story or making a movie, both seem overly
concerned with creating spirit, moments and memories, which
don’t have value when they don’t enhance the story
at hand. Great movie moments happen when they have a major impact on
the story being told. They fit in as much as they stand out.
Plus, Pitch Perfect 2
is a bunch of filler. When in doubt, Banks and company toss in a
montage, or we have to watch yet another musical performance created
for the sole purpose of killing time instead of helping us understand
the characters or advancing the plot. It’s a movie light on
script, and it shows.
Pitch Perfect
2 is not a complete lost cause.
Cannon does a nice job trying to insert some stories about the new
girl, Emily (Hailee Steinfeld), and her clumsy attempts to fit in and
make The Bella experience everything she has always dreamed of.
Then, I wish we spent more time watching Beca (Anna Kendrick) awkwardly
trying to navigate the road between leaving college and entering
adulthood, which seems to be an overall theme of Pitch
Perfect 2 lost in the cloud of
montages and musical performances. Also, Kendrick is the best actor in
the whole darn movie, so why not give her something more complicated
and memorable to do?
Worst of all, Pitch Perfect 2
is a movie from people who figure you want more of what you might have
found entertaining about the first movie, so they give it to you over
and over and over again, even after you long started to beg them to
stop.
Wilson’s overconfident and audacious act is starting to grow
repetitive and the two commentators, John (John Michael Higgins) and
Gail (Banks), are derivative of what we have seen done before and
better. Yet, get ready for repeated scenes of all three ad nauseam.
This creative team even screws up what could have been an awesome
climactic sequence full of surprise cameos by failing to give us more
surprise cameos. The one time where more would have been better is when
they fail to give us more!
You don’t have to take my word for it, and you probably
won’t. I have resigned myself to a weekend of reading angry
emails and tweets from tween girls who think I am the devil for not
embracing Pitch Perfect 2.
Pitch
Perfect 2 is rated PG-13 for innuendo and language.
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