By Subhash K Jha
Film: "Pitch Perfect 3"; Director: Trish Sie; Cast: Anna Kedrick, Rebel Wilson; Rating: **
Thankfully, this franchise has run its course. Though I enjoyed parts of it I really can't take the showy sassiness of the Bellas any more. The all-girl band with more attitude than altitude seemed funny in their misplaced selfworth earlier. Now they look like a bunch of losers held aloft by a script that has seen better days. Indeed the plot is so thin it stretches itself out into 90 minutes of meandering soggy girl babble, best left to dry itself out in the sun.
Sunny locations in Spain, Italy and France do add some badly-needed pizzas to the artificially pepped up plot that's peppered with precocity and puerility.
This time the all-girl band gets together to impress DJ Khalid.
That's it. That's the sum-total of the plot. The rest is padding, improvised musical gigs, doctored romances and staged musical numbers done up with a vestige of verve that tries to make up for the absence of a genuinely inventive plot line and a cohesive narrative structure. Very often I could see the girls struggling to keep the goings-on sturdy on its feet. More often that not the laughably meager storyline makes the narrative come apart at the seams.
The acting even by a veteran like John Lithgow (playing the obese Rebel Wilson's Mafioso dad) is largely awful and the dialogues sound like whatsApp jokes strung together to create a sense of artificial kookiness. Every member of the Bella band seems to believe in the dictum "Bland Is Grand, Bling Is King". By the time the bland band jumps into a river from luxury boat (don't ask why or how) the narrative has sunk to a deplorable low.
If you have an appetite for blingy blandness served up with dollops of self-deprecatory tongue-in-cheek humid humour, go for it. But be warned. There is nothing here you would want to take home to sleep over with.
(Subhash K Jha can be contacted at jhasubh@gmail.com)
