Pitch Perfect 3 – Film Review

After the highs of winning the world championships, the Bellas find themselves split apart and discovering there aren’t job prospects for making music with your mouth. But when they get the chance to reunite for an overseas USO tour, this group of awesome nerds will come together to make some music, and some questionable decisions, one last time.

It’s hard to think of a series that I hold near and dear to my heart that fell off as hard as the Pitch Perfect series. The first film served as an outstandingly wholesome and heartwarming musical comedy, complete with amazing performances, terrific mashups, and an emotional third act that is sure to get even the most macho of people to crack a smile.

The second film does a fantastic job of taking the characters that we’ve grown to know and love and flesh them out a little bit. There are a few scenes in that film in particular that showcase just how amazing the Barden Bellas can be when they are all together, being a family. When they’re on stage, they own the stage.

So why in the world did Pitch Perfect 3 have to be so bad? Directed by Trish Sie in extremely poor fashion, this is a final installment that’ll make you question if you even liked the first two to begin with. It’s a finale that tries to do way too much and also overstays its welcome by adding a newfound sense of ridiculousness to the series that wasn’t there previously.

For example, the opening scene of this movie is a massive fight scene that ends with an explosion on a boat. Why? We do get an explanation later on in the film, but it’s just plain old dumb. It’s almost as if the filmmakers were making this film and thought that it would suck if they didn’t add strange humor into the film.

The two news characters portrayed by John Michael Higgins and Elizabeth Banks return once again to essentially follow the Bellas and the other a capella groups wherever they go, and they are, once again, unbearably annoying. Why do the writers on this series seem to think that these two characters are funny? They’re not.

And what’s up with Fat Amy getting the most outlandishly bizarre backstory in this film? Rebel Wilson is an actress that’s usually good, but here, she’s honestly terrible. She really feels like she’s phoning it in as the character this time around, and it just didn’t seem like she even wanted to be there.

Anna Kendrick is really the only actress involved in this film that actually looks even remotely interested in being there. Her character does, thankfully, get an emotional and satisfactory conclusion which is sure to make fans of the first two films happy. Thankfully they didn’t mess up her arc.

Sadly, though, a lot of this film just feels so thrown together, and like the filmmakers simply didn’t care about making a legitimately good film. This movie barely even has a story, to be honest. Most of it is lacklustre musical performances from other a capella groups including an unintentionally hilarious scene early on involving a group of military men.

There are certainly a couple of things to enjoy about this sendoff to the series, but as a whole, it’s wildly disappointing. The Bellas deserved a much better film and so did their actresses. It’s a thinly written mess that derails in the first few minutes and sadly, never recovers.

Although the third act is solid, Pitch Perfect 3 is an otherwise horribly written conclusion to the trilogy that doesn’t do the talented actresses justice.