Review of Pitch Perfect 2 (2015) by Christopher E — 16 Nov 2015

It's always disappointing when studios manage to take a well respected and awesome movie, and in turn, build off the success of the first movie in order to create a cash grab. For those of you that don't know what a cash-grab is, it simply means a movie is made not for quality, but rather just to make an easy buck. Anyways, here we go.

Pitch Perfect 2 stars the same cast that we all know and love from the first movie, along with some decent music, but some poor comedy. This movie isn't any different from the first movie, and if anything, it's attempt at being as magical and unique as it's predecessor fell well short of expectations. This movie has nothing unique about its premise, and even manages to bore us with the same, awkward humor and lines that the first movie tried to do.

For what it's worth, I actually enjoyed the first half of this movie. Although it was doing the exact (and I mean EXACT) same thing that the first Pitch Perfect movie did, I still enjoyed. It still had the low-brow comedy that I hated, but overall, it was still entertaining. It was fun to see them jump from performance to performance, and there were definitely more music in this movie than the last one. That being said, I liked the first half also because that was the most well thought out and fun part of the movie. It was great to see how Anna Kendrick was struggling with the idea of life after college, along with trying to stay committed to her Acappella group. That was a really interesting plot point that I wish they built on, but it honestly never went anywhere. The little riff-off/competition in the first half of the movie was also the most entertaining part of the movie, and it really does a good job of sucking you into that world. Sadly, this whole movie contained about one scene between the characters of Anna Kendrick and Skylar Astin, which was a real disappointment considering they really made the film for me in the first movie. The chemistry they have together is excellent, and it was nowhere in this movie. No fault to them, but fault towards the screenplay.

Although I actually really enjoyed the unoriginal 1st half of the movie, the minute these girls went to "boot camp" in the 2nd half of the movie, the movie got extremely boring and became a mess. From that point on, this movie tried to be something that it was not, and it actually became bad. For some reason, the problem is that these girls suddenly lost their chemistry and they need to get it back by bonding. To start, this doesn't make sense because it was clearly established that they had won multiple titles together, and this movie tried to tell me that none of that mattered. These girls lost their spark for whatever reason, and this movie just became dumb. I even got bored of the humor after the first few lines of this movie. They desperately tried to create the same comedic characters and one-liners from the first movie, but it just did not work. None of it made any sense, and most of it was in a racist form . You had your stereotypical Mexican jokes said by a Mexican girl, your stereotypical Asian jokes said by an Asian girl, and your stereotypical African-American jokes said by an African-American girl. It was just really lazy, and will probably be offensive to some.

Even the finale for this movie was extremely underwhelming. Although it was a tiny bit heart-warming during one moment, it was under-done and did not completely satisfy our needs. The music started to go bad, and I had actually gotten upset at how much this movie was wasted.

There was even a point in the movie where it turned into a full on musical, and at that point, I just shook my head in agony.

There were even a few constant reoccurring jokes that were not funny, and it was obvious this movie so desperately wanted to be like its predecessor. They even went as far as to try and make a song that would be this film's version of "Cups". Yeah, remember that really popular and unique song that the first film gave us? They tried to recreate that here but because it felt so forced, it just felt wasted.

Look, in the end, I know I said a lot of bad things about this movie, but it wasn't terrible. I actually had a decent time with this movie. I love Anna Kendrick as the lead, and supporting characters like Rebel Wilson and Hailee Steinfeld were great. Even though I didn't love Steinfeld's character, I certainly love her in real life. She's a great singer and actress, and I hope she finds a better role than this one. Now I'm getting off track, sorry. But I also liked the music for the most part, and I was actually able to recognize almost every single song. The comedy in this movie worked at a few parts, but it was obvious that they put little effort into their screenplay. There was a lot of wasted potential in this movie, and everything that the first film did right was absent from this movie. The first half was entertaining enough, and the movie had a few good plot points, but it was followed up by a very poor second half, along with many unnecessary and forced plot points.

I can just say this, if you loved the first movie and you're a under the age of 13, you'll probably love this movie. If you're an adult who liked the first movie, you'll probably think that this movie is okay, but was not nearly as good as it could've been. If you didn't like the first movie or though it was okay, you'll hate this movie. In all, I loved the first film, and I had an alright time with the second film. I liked it enough to barely give it a fresh rating.