Pitch Perfect 2
|  Pitch Perfect 2 picks up three years after the end of Pitch Perfect (2012), which found the Barden Bellas, a collegiate a cappella singing group, winning the national title. In the sequel’s opening scene, the Bellas are riding high, having kept their crown for three consecutive years, but then everything comes crashing down. A performance at the Lincoln Center for President Obama’s birthday turns disastrous when a wardrobe malfunction reveals much more to the audience than Janet Jackson ever dreamed (in other words, the film manages to one-up the original’s opening disaster, which involved a singer vomiting on the audience). Although the disgraced Bellas are suspended from performing, a loophole allows them to retain their title and therefore compete in an international competition, thus upping the stakes from the original and creating a new nemesis in Das Sound Machine, a black-leather-clad German group that would make Mike Myers’s Dieter giddy with excitement (if that were possible).Like the original, Pitch Perfect 2 is a strictly formulaic affair, with screenwriter Kay Cannon (a veteran of 30 Rock who also wrote the original) taking us through the requisite plot points in such a way that opportunities for musical numbers are maximized while just enough new conflicts are introduced to maintain some level of dramatic tension. Of course, it’s all leading up to the big international showdown, which allows the Bellas to finally go head to head with Das Sound Machine, whose leaders, the statuesque Kommissar (Birgitte Hjort-Sørensen) and malapropism-prone Pieter Krämer (Flula Borg), have been taunting them all movie. It also provide a stage for lots of intense a cappella performances (the film maintains the original’s self-aware humor regarding the assumed dorkiness of such an enterprise and then dismantles those assumptions with the high-energy music numbers). Anna Kendrick returns as Beca, the reluctant freshman in the original who is now the group’s de facto senior leader, although her attention and energy are being diverted away from the Bellas toward her internship with a music producer (Keegan-Michael Key), which puts her in conflict with Chloe (Brittany Snow), whose life revolves entirely around the group (she keeps purposely failing classes so she won’t graduate). Other familiar faces return, particularly Rebel Wilson as Fat Amy, who once again gets most of the film’s biggest laughs with her resolute lack of being apologetic for anything. New blood arrives in the form of Hailee Steinfeld’s Emily, whose mother (Katey Sagal) was a Bella back in the early ’80s and has therefore dreamed of joining the group since she was a little girl. Emily is also a songwriter, and her desire to sing original compositions clashes with the fact that a cappella groups rely entirely on covering popular songs, particularly in an amusing sequence in which the Bellas are invited to the mansion of a mysterious impresario (David Cross) who likes to stage riff-off competitions in his ballroom. First-time director Elizabeth Banks, who also returns as the flighty, vindictive podcast host Gail, keeps the film energetic and frothy, which is just good enough to distract you from how mechanical it all is. The film’s best moments tend to feature smarter-than-you’re-expecting throwaway jokes happening at the margins or the very end of scenes, such as Gail’s partner John’s (John Michael Higgins) tendency to un-self-consciously include ridiculously misogynistic statements in his otherwise banal podcast patter and Snoop Dogg appearing in a cameo as himself recording a very genuine Christmas album. Keegan-Michael Key gets quite a few laughs as Beca’s boss, a manic record producer who embodies everything that is most fearful about powerful creative types and whose ire is directed time and again to a lowly intern named Dax (Shawn Carter Peterson). The movie’s self-aware goofiness pads the time between musical numbers, which are duly impressive and, to be honest, what most people are coming for anyway.
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Overall Rating: 
(2.5)
