By Preston Wilder
What’s the deal with Pitch Perfect 2? It hits a wall halfway through, and what was sassy and carefree suddenly becomes long and tedious. This is the second comedy in two weeks with women both in front of and behind the camera (Hollywood sexism is a hot-button issue at the moment), but Hot Pursuit doesn’t flag whereas this one collapses in the second half – mostly, I suspect, because Hot Pursuit is 87 minutes long whereas this one is 115. Half an hour is an aeon in comedy.
The turning point, for me, was the so-called ‘riff-off’, a scene where five a cappella groups clash at the behest of an eccentric rich guy, the point of the game being to pick up the beat from one’s opponents and improvise on a theme (it’s an a cappella version of the rap battle). It might be impressive in real life – but the voices are obviously Auto-Tuned, the references very American (I know vaguely who the Green Bay Packers are, but not enough to find them hilarious) and the scene goes on and on, turning into a 15-minute mini-epic. The extended riff-off seems to derail the movie, killing the momentum established by the snappy first half – because afterwards everything thuds, more and more. By the time we get the Barden Bellas bonding around a campfire, each one sharing what she hopes to achieve after leaving college, the film has become actively painful.
The Bellas are our heroines, of course, an all-girl a cappella group whose golden harmonies are the envy of the world – at least till Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson) accidentally flashes President Obama during a command performance gone embarrassingly wrong, leading the ladies on a quest for redemption. Ms. Wilson is indeed over-exposed, a moon-faced comedienne who shines in small roles (I still recall the first time I saw her, asking to go on her Facebook break in the otherwise-dire What to Expect When You’re Expecting) but gets monotonous when asked to give pep talks, rub butts and even play a romantic sub-plot. Anna Kendrick, with her shrewd vulpine expression, is a much better actress – but gets wasted here, as the Bella who’s looking beyond the Bellas. The film doesn’t play to its strengths, or maybe Pitch Perfect fans see different strengths.
That’s the caveat, of course: this kind of sparkly karaoke musical – which began with Moulin Rouge! 15 years ago, hitting its twin peaks with Mamma Mia! on the big screen and Glee on TV – is a matter of taste, and personally I’m not a fan. Hearing well-known tunes being covered only makes me long for the originals, while the hyperactive dance numbers and frenzied sing-a-long vibe (it’s no accident that both Moulin Rouge! and Mamma Mia! have exclamation marks in their titles) makes me feel like a trapped clown at a 12-year-old girl’s birthday party. Then again, I doubt it’s just personal taste getting in the way – because I did find the first hour of Pitch Perfect 2 very enjoyable, till it got tiresome.
It begins pitch-perfectly, with the Universal Pictures intro sung a cappella by a pair of commentators played by Elizabeth Banks (also the film’s director) and John Michael Higgins, a veteran of Christopher Guest mockumentaries whose nonchalant sexist remarks – “You’re just women. And you’re all going to be pregnant soon” – are superbly inappropriate. All the stuff on the fringes is great, from Snoop Dogg (a.k.a. Snoop Lion) spoofing rap-star narcissism to Keegan-Michael Key as a big-shot music producer who “sleeps on a bed of Grammys” – and of course there’s Das Sound Machine, a crushingly efficient German group featuring sardonic first lieutenant Flula Borg. Someday perhaps there’ll be a day when we no longer laugh at a tall, disdainful German opining zat ze Bellas are “a heated mess” and suggesting alternative names for Fat Amy – including “Obese Denise” and “Inflexible Tina” – all in a thick Teutonic accent, but hopefully that day will never come.
So far, so good; but already there are signs of a film that’s low on ideas. Most of the minor Bellas are one-joke characters, and why is no-one bothered that the ethnic-minority Bellas – the weird Asian girl and the illegal-immigrant Latina girl – are comic relief? Still, Pitch Perfect 2 bounces merrily along for about an hour, the sheer disposability of its main plot (once the girls are warned that no American group has ever won this contest before, we might as well skip straight to the happy ending) actually a feature rather than a bug – but then the riff-off takes forever, and then each new scene seems to dissipate the energy even further. Do we care about the new girl’s unmemorable song, or Fat Amy and whatsisname? How can a film fizz so happily, then abruptly stop fizzing? A heated mess, indeed.
DIRECTED BY Elizabeth Banks
STARRING Anna Kendrick, Rebel Wilson, Brittany Snow
US 2015 115 mins
