Pitch Perfect 2
1 Waffle!

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.