Originally published May 17, 2015 on FrontRowCentral.com
That the original Pitch Perfect became enough of a hit to warrant a sequel (with another on the way) is a great thing in and of itself. I wouldn’t necessarily say it captured lightning in a bottle, so much as it directed that lightning toward an outlet that desperately needed it. Honestly, multiplexes could stand to show more movies “like this.” I put that last part in quotation marks because, while there definitely deserves to be more movies of this sort out there, nobody needs more Pitch Perfect movies if they’re all just going to turn out the way this one did.
Pitch Perfect 2 opens with the Barden University Bellas, hot on the heels of winning their third a cappella championship, performing to a packed house on national television. Disaster strikes immediately, as their number is needlessly overblown and more than a little irresponsible. Things come to a screeching halt when Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson) rips her outfit, exposing herself to President Obama and millions of TV viewers. Back again at the bottom of the totem pole, team leader Beca (Anna Kendrick) decides the only way to get back in everyone’s good graces is for the team to win the world a cappella championship in Copenhagen.
That’s ostensibly the plot, the story that’s supposed to be driving everything forward. In the loooong middle section between their calamitous fall and easily won redemption, the Bellas engage in all sorts of hijinks on and off campus that have little practical bearing on where things end up. They have a new recruit in tow in freshman Emily (Hailee Steinfeld, essentially filling Anna Kendrick’s role in the first film); Beca sneaks off from time to time to intern at Keegan-Michael Key’s recording studio; Fat Amy shares a few tender moments with Adam DeVine’s Dumptruck. Is his name Dumptruck? I’m gonna call him Dumptruck.
Each of these plots distract from the a cappella championship thread we’re supposed to be following, in which the Bellas repeatedly tangle with their German rivals, Das Sound Machine, a well-oiled, robotic menace with a penchant for Fallout Boy. If I’m being honest, though, I found myself not really minding that the film kept veering off-course. It’s pretty clear Elizabeth Banks (making her feature directing debut) and screenwriter Kay Cannon don’t have much interest in it either. The further we get from the competition, the more opportunities the film has to go in some truly strange directions.
A mid-film riff-off taking place in David Cross’ basement is the closest Pitch Perfect 2 comes to embracing the absurdist bent that it so clearly wants to take. And on top of that, it’s a scene filled with some of today’s best comedy performers (and also the Green Bay Packers, because why the hell not). It makes me think that if they really want to keep this series going, the best option might be to lean more heavily on the comedy. Get David Wain to direct Pitch Perfect 3, or at the very least bring him in to collaborate, because Banks definitely knows how to stage a joke better than her predecessor.
Watching both Pitch Perfects back to back, you can see the moments where the sequel just throws up its hands and gives up. The first film follows your standard “finding yourself at college”/”plucky team of nobodies go for the gold” stories almost to a T. When it’s not baldly mistaking racism for comedy, it works more often than it doesn’t. Then you watch Pitch Perfect 2, and the film only pays lip service to all of that plot stuff so that it can focus on doing literally anything else (while still making a number of excessively tasteless jokes). I realize I’m giving short shrift here to the musical numbers, but that’s kind of how the film operates. Weirdly enough, where the first film completely bungled its comedy in favor of the music, the sequel manages to swap the two almost entirely and to pretty mixed effect.
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