Pitch Perfect 3: It Is Hardly  Perfect, But Fun In Parts

Pitch Perfect 3

Starring Anna Kedrick, Rebel Wilson

Directed  by Trish Sie

Rating: **(2 stars)

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 dialoguessound like whats app 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.