Pitch Perfect 3 ** (2017, Anna Kendrick, Rebel Wilson, Brittany Snow, Anna Camp, Hailee Steinfeld) – Movie Review

Pitch Perfect 3 is bright enough for the first hour, with enough warmth and good humour and some enjoyable numbers, but it fizzles out and then just fades away, leaving no good taste or lasting impression behind.

As the Bellas reunite for an improbable overseas USO tour, there are some laughs, but a lot more witty banter is needed, and a hold on reality and credibility. Pitch Perfect ought to be truthful comedy, but Pitch Perfect  3 is contrived artlessly. The big, carefully set-up plot about the Bellas reuniting for one last singing competition against a hot group uses instruments as well as voices goes for nothing.

It is simply abandoned, as though they thought better of it. It’s too weak to sustain a movie, the script committee thought, let’s think of something else. And so they come up with something far weaker, and far more extraneous and irrelevant, far less Pitch Perfect.

It is sad to say that all the bits with John Lithgow as Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson)’s long-lost errant Aussie dad Fergus are pretty terrible. This plot strand is as pathetic and pointless as Lithgow’s Aussie accent. What is it even doing here? It turns our dad is the same old evil cretin he was when Amy duped him years ago, and now he’s just pretending to have changed to get her to Mustique to cash in on the dead mothers millions.

It is part of the film’s plot to show men up in a bad light. Men are just cute lame sex objects – Matt Lanter’s kindly military man Chicago, or prejudiced, chauvinists (John Michael Higgins’s TV commentator John), or appalling fathers like Fergus or Aubrey (Anna Camp)’s for ever absent dad, or manipulative chancers like record producer Theo (Guy Burnet). Pitch Perfect 3 makes you wonder, don’t women actually like me at all?

It stars Anna Kendrick, Rebel Wilson, Hailee Steinfeld, Anna Camp, Brittany Snow, Ester Dean, Hana Mae Lee, Kelly Jackle, Shelley Regener, and Chrissie Fit. All of them are very competent, briskly professional, and some of them are quite winning. They deserve a better movie. Rebel Wilson takes over with her loud-mouthed, boorish Aussie act. She is quite funny, but a little of her goes a long way, and less would be more.

It follows Pitch Perfect and Pitch Perfect 2.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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