Pitch Perfect II
Wilfully stupid instead of just stupid
The world of competitive collegiate acapella is not, you may think, a rich seam of source material for quality filmmaking. And you’d be right. The first Pitch Perfect was a farty bum-note that warbled between face-slappingly shit to downright offensive. Its identikit plot was punctuated with vile stereotype bashing, and its cast of hooting goons and screeching arseholes would, at the drop of a twatty hat, burst into sub-Glee musical set-pieces so harrowing Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon could not fully convey their horror.
Weird thing is, there were one or two things about PP1 that made it almost watchable, and enough teenage girls paid to see it to justify a sequel. Consequently, I just sat through PP2. And you know what? It was less terrible than PP1. In the same way as anal warts are less terrible than, say, Parkinson’s disease. Not that you’d choose to endure either…
This time around the plot, which involves our howling heroines seeking to regain respect after Barack Obama sees one of their vaginas, is wilfully stupid instead of just stupid. This newfound self-awareness also means the musical numbers don’t have quite the same eye-watering mustard gas effect as before, and Rebel Wilson’s Fat Amy, easily the highlight of the first film, is more centre-stage this time.
There’s still way too much reductive humour, and far too many skinny white girls singing through their noses, but PP3, due in 2017, might actually be good.
