A James Bond singalong
PITCH PERFECT 3 VEERS TOWARD THE INEVITABLE
Given long enough, it seems, every film franchise tends toward James Bondishness. It doesn’t matter how inauspiciously modest the first instalment, or how unsuitable the themes and milieu may be to blockbuster action- adventure. Eventually, our beloved heroes will bore of their humble surrounds and find themselves whisked into a globe-trotting caper replete with espionage and international terrorism, with costly stunt- work and rousing valour, as an ordinary movie based in a moreor-less recognizable world is stretched and swollen into madcap fantasy.
A simple campus comedy such as Pitch Perfect, about the hapless efforts of a college a cappella group thus becomes by Pitch Perfect 3 a sensational romp involving villainous yachts, hostage situations, breakneck fisticuffs, and, almost in lieu of the genre’s requisite car chases, spectacular musical set pieces mounted across exotic locales. It is in essence a Bond picture that stars a dozen singing girls.
Because Pitch Perfect was a campus comedy, and because Pitch Perfect 3 takes place several years after any student could reasonably be expected to have graduated from school, the writers must conspire from the outset to devise an acceptable pretence for adult women who ought to have moved on with their lives to return to the bosom of their collegiate a cappella group for what, in the parlance of the kind of heist film with which this one shares a great deal in common, is known as One Last Job. What Kay Cannon and Mike White came up with was an overseas USO tour whose concert series is conveniently amenable to the last-minute addition of a clique of amateur musicians and which for reasons too carelessly explained for me to reiterate here is also a competition for some kind of record deal or touring opportunity. In any case, the ladies travel to Spain to sing, and to the south of France to sing, and we are to take it that it matters.
The basically arbitrary character of the premise is part of the charm of what Pitch Perfect 3 is doing, which is pinwheeling its heroes into amusing situations without regard for naturalism or what a connoisseur of a cappella trilogies might call internal logical. It matters why Anna Kendrick and Rebel Wilson leap out of the way of an explosion into the French Riviera after a performance of “Toxic” about as much as it matters why, say, Vin Diesel cannons over the gap between highways to tackle Michelle Rodriguez after a tank crashes into a sports-car, and indeed many of Pitch Perfect 3’s more unapologetically ludicrous episodes have the unmistakable halfwit panache of a late Fast and Furious sequel.
A reckless, unfettered Pitch Perfect, like a reckless, unfettered Fast and Furious, must be judged on how well it makes use of its opportunity for delight. The director of Pitch Perfect 3, Trish Sie, demonstrated in her supremely under- appreciated Step Up All In a fine eye for choreography and the kind of set- piece brio one wishes of a blockbuster musical, shooting that film’s many dance sequences in wide shots and sustained long takes. Here, quite inexplicably, she favours instead a frenetic montage that dices the a cappella musical numbers into a chaos of inserts and close-ups, hardly a memorable image among them. If one is to be generous, the reason may be found in the stature of certain members of the ensemble cast, whose schedules do not permit the level of rigorous training required to memorize elaborate routines. And yet even if Sie’s failure is simply a case of doing the best with what she’s got, the effect is still the same.
Of course this sort of thing lapses into cliché soon enough. One anticipates the hallmarks of the series in much the way one expects jump scares in a horror film: here we enjoy the staple “riff- off,” which is as I understand something of a combination rap- battle and impromptu a cappella medley; here we enjoy the triumphant grand finale, an emphatic barn- burner that, this time around, actively defies both the hurdles imposed by the story (antagonists who refuse to allow the heroes to sing together seemingly don’t mind if they do) and the minor details of realism ( singers without microphones do not need them).
This makes Pitch Perfect 3 at once satisfying and dull. It’s difficult, if not impossible, for an audience to care about the outcome of a tournament that the film can hardly muster the enthusiasm to delineate with care. It’s harder still to care about the types of turmoil the movie fairly feels obliged to fabricate in a transparent bid for gravity. ½