Pitch Perfect 2 isn’t a musical—its characters’ songs are almost always covers of Billboard hits (as the hardass-with-a-heart boss figure explicitly points out to Anna Kendrick’s Beca [sic.]) and the one original song in the movie doesn’t advance plot so much as it functions as the creative product around which plot can form, mostly in Act 3. The movie as a whole is a comedy that involves a lot of music, structurally and aesthetically.
itch Perfect 2 isn’t a musical—its characters’ songs are almost always covers of Billboard hits (as the hardass-with-a-heart boss figure explicitly points out to Anna Kendrick’s Beca [sic.]) and the one original song in the movie doesn’t advance plot so much as it functions as the creative product around which plot can form, mostly in Act 3. The movie as a whole is a comedy that involves a lot of music, structurally and aesthetically.
This movie is funny, funny as it perfects and makes vague gestures toward “subverting” a brand of easy, commonplace humor: Fat Amy is fat and does clumsy things, the three minority women in the Bellas never speak a line that doesn’t parlay their respective Stock Character statuses for an in-type laugh, and there’s the requisite closeted gay man providing a play-by-play for the group’s a capella performances.
This movie is a college movie that never gets that college-y—the Bellas live in an absurdly nice home on the campus of Barden University, the comfort and cleanliness of which I can’t imagine exists on any real campus in America, and papers and problem sets are nowhere to be seen—just as it’s a music movie that never gets that music-y—the hard process of creation exists in the gaps between scenes, a couple of shots behind a Central Casting recording studio mix board, and a montage of Beca’s frustration while wearing Beats (since that’s what sound engineers wear).
Thematically stronger than all of that in this movie is the dream of spontaneous unity. I have no idea how many times characters break into song without any reference pitch in this movie, and how many times that’s followed by all surrounding humans joining the song a bar later in impeccable, in-tune harmony. It’s intensely unrealistic, and it doesn’t seem as if the filmmakers have any intention of playing the phenomenon off as mimetic. Watching the movie, I didn’t find myself thinking of these moments as either annoyingly impractical or fantastical—they’re just performances (literally) of elements of a world that fundamentally plays by our rules, but has this strange—lovely—quirk.
The allegorical/metaphorical/generally socially figurative possibilities of spontaneous unity manifested in the world (here the diegetic one, but why not ours, too?) are too promising and too easy to work out here—broken Congress, culture wars, the coming necessity of cooperation when our ecological catastrophe and/or ISIS really comes, blahblahblah—so suffice to say that watching a movie interested, yes, in a group coalescing, but more importantly in that fraternity expanding out toward an all-enveloping public communion by song is a much more life-affirming proposition than anything you’ll find on HBO.