PITCH PERFECT: 2 ½ STARS
What do you get when you mix equal parts “Glee” with “Mean Girls” with a side order of “Bring it On”? You get the musical goulash “Pitch Perfect,” a school comedy combo that offers up singing, cliques, a “riff off” and vomit jokes.
In an effort to make friends Beca (Anna Kendrick) reluctantly joins The Bellas, a straight-laced college campus all-girl a capella group, only to end up performing a “songs about sex” medley highlighting Blackstreet’s “No Diggity.” Along the way she learns to open up, love “The Breakfast Club” and deal with the group’s “a capolitics.”
Midway through “Pitch Perfect” Jesse (Skylar Astin), Beca’s tuneful love interest, says, “Not liking movies is like not liking puppies.” I’m not going to suggest that not liking this movie means you don’t like puppies, but it tries its best to be cuddly, lovable and scratch its furry belly.
Sure there’s barf gags (literally… imagine a vomit angel…wait, don’t)—which picks up where the food poisoning scene “Bridesmaids” left off—but there’s also female bonding, a romance and musical numbers galore.
And therein lies the problem. The cast, led by American sweetheart Kendrick and Australian Rebel Wilson as Fat Amy, are immensely watchable. Funny, charming and occasionally odd (during one bonding scene Lilly, played by Hana Mae Lee, confesses to eating her twin in the womb) and when they’re talking, it’s mostly fun. But unfortunately, between The Bellas and their male counterparts The Treblemakers, they also sing. A lot. And the music is the least interesting part of the movie.
Imagine Bobby McFerrin wannabes for ninety minutes.
Luckily “Pitch Perfect” banks some goodwill on the strength of the performances, but the presentation of “oral magic” feels more like, as one character says, “an elephant dart to the public’s face.”
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