I’m not going to bother writing one of the 12 titles I came up with…
Actually, ‘Off-key’, ‘Out of Tune’, ‘Bad Pitch’, ‘Acca-Please No More’, ‘Accascuse Me That’s Cars 2?’, ‘Pitch not so Perfect’, ‘Broken Record’, ‘Skip, Skip, Skip, Skip’, ‘More like a Zune and not a classic iPod’, ‘My girlfriend had the free champagne and not me #baddecisions’, ‘Not even close to being perfect’ or ‘Exit Stage Left’.
Let’s add some context because that was as harsh as my thoughts on Justice League. I love the first Pitch Perfect, I think its actually a great movie with well-made characters and music that is surprisingly good. The film was a through back to some 80’s classics but made in the modern day and its the type of film that I don’t mind watching multiple times. The second Pitch Perfect wasn’t as great and was at least bearable but was unfortunately not up to the standard of the first Pitch Perfect. At the end of the second Pitch Perfect film, there is a great closing moment that says goodbye to all the characters that you love. This is fundamentally what is the central problem of Pitch Perfect 3, we already did this and there isn’t much of a point of it all.
Pitch Perfect 3 occurs after Pitch Perfect 2 where The Bellas have all finished college and are trying to live out their dream jobs. Each Bella though isn’t happy with their lives and misses their days of being a Bella. The gang ends up joining a USO tour competition where they have to compete against other bands to win a spot as the opening act for DJ Khalid. Meanwhile, Fat Amy’s father returns to reunite with his daughter but his reasoning is shifty and suspicious.
That last line there, Fat Amy’s returning father, is what makes this film feel like such a mess and makes the film feel pointless. There is no need for Pitch Perfect 3 because Pitch Perfect 2 had a good closing ending for The Bellas but instead, now we have a film half about Fat Amy’s father and how he is up to no good and resulting in The Bellas having to do spy like work to get out of a tricky situation. I didn’t even remember that Fat Amy had run away from home, which I feel like is an important detail to remember considering it’s meant to be the second most emotional part of the movie. This part of the story ends up being similar to that of Cars 2, if you’re not familiar with Cars 2 basically Lightning McQueen is on a world tour and he brings Mater along with him. Mcqueen isn’t the main focus of the film though as the focus is on the fact that Mater has been recruited by a British spy agency to stop a plan that could put everyone else’s lives in danger. I might be one of the only people to think it but its eerily similar to Pitch Perfect 3 and it’s storytelling, both in the story and in how bad it is.
There are a few good jokes to be had in Pitch Perfect 3 but they are all similar jokes to the first two, trying to grab at new nostalgia I guess, and Pitch Perfect 3 perfectly manages to rely on the previous films to hold itself up in terms of relevancy. The music is the same except instead of some good mixes and nice renditions of songs you’ve got a sense of laziness that you can see just by looking at the titles of the songs or the bands, Evermoist…..really? Someone came up with that and lots of people agreed to it? It just baffles me that when recreating the vibe of the first two films they didn’t recreate the same aspects you love about them, but instead managed to make it worse or make it feel unoriginal. The competition in the film isn’t even shown properly and the bad guys ended up loving The Bellas and no one seems to really care that the competition is on, especially you.
The end of this trilogy is now the butt of its own joke. The only evolution that has happened in the Pitch Perfect series is that The Bellas go from covering songs to making their own songs but somehow they revert back in this film. The Pitch Perfect trilogy has gone from having the best bits of classic teen movies, mainly the ideals of 80’s teen movies, to being something slightly more original and it’s own thing to number 3 where it’s now covering itself and sounding very much like a broken record. The line in Pitch Perfect 3 is “So you sing cover songs?” and somehow Pitch Perfect 3 has managed to become the badly sung cover song of the first two Pitch Perfect films. You just can’t make a film like this when you have perfect in the title of the film, so raise your glasses and press skip because I’m glad to say it’s over Pitches.