She is a great singer but honestly Hailee Steinfeld is the biggest problem with this film. I absolutely hate her character.

Pitch Perfect 2 continues to follow the Barden Bellas as they’ve made international fame being fantastic at singing. However things come to a head when Fat Amy accidentally flashes The President and they are disqualified from being a group. They can redeem this however by going to the World Championships where they fight against their biggest rival – Das Sound Machine – who are very stereotypically German.

This movie doesn’t hold up as well as the first and that’s because you don’t have the same excitement of meeting these characters for the first time and seeing their relationships and friendships blossom. You get to see the character development with a lot of them including Becca, getting a job as an intern at a music producing label, seeing fat Amy and Bumper’s relationship blossom (which comes out of left field but is kind of cute towards the end), and also seeing how Chloe deals with Aubrey now having left college and gone on to get a job and how she deals with handling the Barden Bellas alone.

As I said at the start Hailee Steinfield is the newest Barden Bella and she is very annoying, no offence to the actress, she’s great, but the character is just so frustrating. She constantly keeps coming out with this song she’s written at the most inappropriate and annoying times and it’s cute when they use it at the end of the show and they win the World Championships and all that, but during the film I just wish she’d leave. Because her character looks so young it really ages the rest of the cast too and makes it really hard to keep up that illusion that they are all college students.

This movie doesn’t hold a candle to the first. I found the Barden Bellas quite annoying in that they were constantly trying to take inspiration from other groups especially Das Sound Machine, because they feel threatened, rather than sticking to what they know and how good they are as a group. It’s interesting to see how there is conflict within the group with outside jobs and hobbies etc. but at the same time all the issues seem too on the nose and too abrupt, whereas in the first film there were a lot of issues to be had but they were all fun and exciting and unfortunately in this film they were not.

I wouldn’t pick up this movie again any time soon, I’d much rather stick to the original because I feel that was the best. This is definitely a case of a film doing super well in the box office and they think they can do an easy sequel and make even more money, but then that does mean that usually the film is a lot worse than the original because it doesn’t have that same spark or energy that it did.While I wouldn’t watch this film again I will definitely watch the original because it is just fantastic.

What do you think of Pitch Perfect 2?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding