40 Movies Review

'Pitch Perfect' review: Anna Kendrick stars in grating music-com

Director: Jason Moore; Screenwriter: Kay Cannon; Starring: Anna Kendrick, Rebel Wilson, Anna Camp, Brittany Snow, Skylar Astin; Running time: 112 mins; Certificate: 12A

If you're not yet convinced that Rebel Wilson is a rising star worth keeping an eye on, you need only look at the way she single-handedly makes the grating Pitch Perfect almost watchable. She plays Fat Amy - a no-nonsense girl who calls herself that so that skinny bitches won't say it behind her back first - with such deadpan bravado and infectious confidence that this essentially one-note character becomes the best thing in the film.

Our leading lady, though, is the charming but miscast Anna Kendrick as edgy loner Beca. We can tell she's edgy because she wears a lot of eye makeup. What Beca really wants is to be a DJ, but her dad insists she attend college before upping sticks to follow her disc-spinning dreams in LA. She's reluctantly enlisted by waspy a cappella group the Bellas who, led by Anna Camp's high-strung Aubrey, are hoping to finally outdo their smug male counterparts the Treblemakers.

As far as the so-called humor goes, we're operating on a sliding scale from lazy to downright offensive. In the first category, there's a pair of running gags - one involving projectile vomit, the other involving the prefix "acca" being added to words - that aren't funny to begin with and become less and less so with every repetition. As for the second category, there is one character whose entire comedic identity revolves around the fact that she is a black lesbian. Another is a shy Asian girl who speaks too quietly for anybody to understand.

'Pitch Perfect' still: Brittany Snow and Anna Camp
If you're going to border so frequently on objectionable, you'd better have a definite sense of why you're doing it – a strange case in point being Martin McDonagh's In Bruges, which contextualized its lead character's un-PC dialog within a tightly-written emotional story. Longtime 30 Rock scribe Kay Cannon doesn't seem to have any idea what story she's telling here, but it certainly isn't anything to do with a group of girls developing actual relationships or growing together as a team.

"I really liked those girls," Beca says sadly at one point, having been ousted from the group. But we've never seen her like those girls, and more to the point we've never been given any reason to like those girls ourselves. Camp is nigh-on unbearable as the shrill, selfish Aubrey, while Brittany Snow simpers ineffectually as her right-hand woman Chloe, and the less said about the rest of the walking stereotypes the better.

The film's not without standout moments - Beca's audition song performed on cups is a hauntingly pretty interlude, while Elizabeth Banks and John Michael Higgins get some wry zingers in as a pair of smarmy a cappella competition commentators. But when the whole is this shallow and hateful, it's hard to summon up the energy to enjoy the parts.

Comparisons have been widely drawn to Bridesmaids, to Mean Girls, and most obviously to Glee. But where all three of those ensemble pieces have heart and wit and genuine love for their characters, all Pitch Perfect has is a collection of thinly-drawn shells squawking at one another without ever sharing a single moment that feels real.

You May Like