I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Pitch Perfect 2 is “pitch perfect”, but
the quality of the music and the catchy tunes make it entertaining and
fun. Certainly, the hundreds of spirited
young girls in the audience tonight were highly approving judging by their
frequent laughter and grooving with the songs. It is a little too sweet and girly in places for my
taste—almost embarrassingly so—but that didn’t keep me from enjoying it.
If you saw the first Pitch Perfect, this will be familiar to you in that an all-female a
cappella singing group keeps winning prizes for their performances despite all
the doubts of others. The message
is that if you have talent—despite public mistakes, have faith in yourself
enough to flaunt it. This “2” is a bit like The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is to the first one—more of
the same, but still entertaining.
The writers (Kay Cannon, screenplay; Mickey
Rapkin, novel) and Director Elizabeth Banks make sincere attempts to address
current issues and controversies about race, gender, and sexual orientation by
making jokes about them, but they are more often misses than hits. Their most successful ones are spoken
by Flo (Chrissie Fit), a Latina who humorously points out tragedies and close
calls in her life that were so much worse than the situations other characters
are dithering about at the time.
When someone says, “Is anybody scared?”, her reply with perfect timing
is, “Not me; I’ve already lived longer than I ever expected.” Where the joke falls flat is a time
when someone starts to say, “I was…” and the other person says, “Oh, I thought
you were going to say you were gay.”
That brings me to another off-putting aspect of
the script, which is that some characters (John, played by John Michael
Higgins; and Keegan-Michael Key, Beca’s boss) are overly snarky and cruel,
rather than funny and clever as I assume they were intended to be. Both snarky and cruel can be funny, but
not in this script. John makes
some shockingly sexist comments about the Bellas that are so stereotypical—but
since they are still adhered to by some in our society, are no longer
funny. Beca’s boss humiliates an
intern continuously, which is supposed to be funny, I guess, but isn’t.
I also thought the initial “disaster” for which
the Bellas are going to be severely chastised is over the top. It’s a little creepy to play up the
event—such as it is—as a sexual no-no and then linking it to the historical
Marilyn Monroe birthday song for President Kennedy. Poor taste, I think.
To me, the best part of this production is
listening to the a cappella groups sing, along with Anna Kendrick’s singing and
performing. Another of the funny
parts of the script is her trying to be snarky, which never comes off as
biting; it just sounds dorky because Beca has so little hostility. I also greatly enjoyed the Snoop Dogg
segments; Beca’s mashing up his song without his apparently noticing was
priceless.
Many
will find this pitch perfect.
Grade: C+ By Donna R. Copeland
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