Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Pitch Perfect 2

"Pitch Perfect 2" (CCK: 6.2/10; AJ: 6.3/10; IMDB: 7.2; Rotten Tomatoes: 66%)













Premise: College a cappella group sets out to win the World a cappella championship to save the group from being disbanded after an embarrassing, highly-public performance snafu.

CCKReview:  Saw this with my friend Andrea, hence the addition of an AJ score and the lack of an RMM score this time.  I did not like the original "Pitch Perfect".  I should have.  I love Anna Kendrick.  I love bad pop music.  I like a cappella music.  But in the first movie I found some of the dialog and scenarios aggressively unpleasant for no apparent reason.  PP2 suffers from less of this off-key humor, possibly because there seem to be fewer scenes of the Elizabeth Banks/John Michael Higgins announcer characters, but why have any of the offhanded misogyny, racism or homophobia at all? There are movies where they could toss barbs out in the dialog and possibly pull it off because it's being done as obvious satire, but nothing else is subtle about this movie so these jokes fall flat for me here.   I did like the musical numbers and Anna Kendrick manages to be charming and hilarious throughout.  If you want to see a much better Anna Kendrick musical though I would recommend "Camp". Or if you want to see more music from Hailee Steinfeld, check out last year's "Begin Again".

1 comment:

  1. As always, I thank you for doing the dirty work of watching films that might sound appealing to me, and letting me know what I'm likely to not like about them. ;-)

    And yay, Camp!

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