569. Pitch Perfect (2012)

Starring: Anna Kendrick, Rebel Wilson, Brittany Snow

Director: Jason Moore

Running Time: 113 mins

Pitch Perfect is an American film about a girl who, on arrival at her new college, is pushed into joining up to the Barden Bellas, an all-girl music group competing in a university singing contest, and she, along with her friends, must turn everything up to eleven to defeat the school’s all-male singing group in the national finals.

For a film that basically just capitalised on the still unexplained success of the TV series Glee, I was surprised when I managed to make it to the end. Not to say that it’s a terrible film though, there’s some great performances, a good soundtrack, despite the incredibly formulaic story, relatively poor comedy and largely irritating nature.

But by far the main benefit of this film was that it wasn’t insufferable to watch. Combining two of my least favourite genres, musical and high school/university girls’ social hierarchy, I was shocked to see that it wasn’t the most irritating thing I’ve ever seen.

I still would maintain that it is quite annoying to watch, but that’s down to other factors that I’ll talk about in a second, however what is incredibly pleasant to see is that this film doesn’t go too far with the concept of the social hierarchy, making it enjoyable for even more people, while also using songs from all decades dating back to the 60s, which makes it a whole lot more fun to listen to, especially if you were never into the rubbish that Glee sang.

I was also impressed by a lot of the performances. On paper, it’s not a particularly strong cast, and one you think would get under your skin within minutes of its opening, however with some strong and fun performances, namely by the Australian Rebel Wilson, who was a joy to watch, it also helped to prevent this film from being too annoying.

However, there was a big problem, in my opinion, with the level of comedy as a whole. Again, there were fun performances, and quite a few individual jokes that had me laughing from time to time, but the fact that, for the majority of the film, some gags were just recycled again and again until they really did become insufferable, while a lot of others just weren’t that funny.

The biggest problem, though, by a mile, was the story. It’s Mean Girls, all the episodes of Glee, and every possible teen romantic comedy story you can think of lumped together, being one of the most predictable stories I’ve ever seen. Within five minutes of the word go, I had pretty much figured out every twist that would come up, and although that doesn’t stop the enjoyment of this film, it is a little disappointing to see such a lack of originality in terms of the screenplay.

Overall, I’ll give this a 6.5, because it was a relatively enjoyable film that, apart from its story, managed to avoid the main problems of its genre.