Director: Rebel Wilson
Writer: Rebel Wilson
Stars: Rebel Wilson, Jennifer Coolidge, Guz Khan, Randall Park
Synopsis: Rebel Wilson plays a former girl group star from the early naughties who is forced to coach a rag tag bunch of teen girls to make them into a group for a record label competition.
It’s an extremely rare occurrence to watch a movie at any festival and, as the credits roll, scratch your head as to what you’ve just witnessed, but that is an unceremonious award that suitably belongs to Rebel Wilson’s Girl Group. A movie devoid of any sign of creative integrity, filled to the brim with painfully unfunny gags, and masquerading as the cheapest imitation of Pitch Perfect to date, it can only be described as a car crash happening in slow motion from start to finish.
Girl Group follows Tassie Young (Rebel Wilson), a washed-up former star of a 1990s Spice Girls knock-off called Gurlfriends. Three decades later, as the band reforms for a comeback tour, Tassie finds herself unwanted by the group and, after a run-in with the law, is forced to take on community service. This leads her to become a tutor for a new ragtag girl group as they enter a battle-of-the-bands-style competition. There, they face their stiffest competition in the form of the Cream Team, whose manager (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell) has drilled them into becoming somewhat unstoppable.
If that premise sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The movie is unashamedly an amalgamation of the storylines of Pitch Perfect 1 & 2. We have the initial formation of a group made up of “cast-offs” who all bear a remarkable resemblance to the original Pitch Perfect cast. We have antagonists who, once again, look almost identical to the Das Sound Machine group from Pitch Perfect 2. If that isn’t enough, the new girl group, whose name is as forgettable as the rest of the story, performs an original song in the finale that goes against the rules of the competition. Funnily enough, that is also the very same climax as Pitch Perfect 2.
There’s not one element of Rebel Wilson’s script that feels even vaguely unique. Every narrative beat has been done before and done so much better, from the failed mid-movie performance to the inevitable reuniting of the band after an attempt to pull at some emotional heartstrings, before ultimately winning over audiences with their newly reunited front. There are no two ways about it: Girl Group is a cheap cosplay of an iconic movie that is still enjoyed by many around the world today.
Even the characters created in this mess bear such a striking resemblance to those from other movies that it becomes rather insulting. Worse still, there’s nothing particularly memorable about any of them, so much so that you could make a game out of trying to guess the characters’ names when the credits roll and you’d be hard pressed to name more than one. The only real exception is Henrietta (Mia Kaplan), and that’s because she’s forced to be the “Fat Amy” of the group and is persecuted for her differences throughout, something that feels rather baffling given the core themes the movie tries to explore.
The young cast are entirely blameless. They ultimately do their very best with the dreadful material they are given in what is, for many of them, their first major role in a Hollywood production. But they feel doomed from the get-go. Even when the film tries to take a more profound look at female empowerment and the oversexualization of the music industry, it devolves into a tick-box exercise that culminates in one of the most painfully misplaced rap scenes I think I have ever seen.
What’s equally tiresome are the endless attempts to be funny that fall flatter than a pancake. There’s an effort to be insightful by creating jokes about the current state of the music industry, including how artists succumb to drinking and driving or using drugs while believing they are above the law. It’s essentially just pointing out things that people already think and expecting them to be greeted with an abundance of laughter. Instead, it results in some truly uncomfortable and cringey extended scenes, with the punchline delivery getting worse and worse the longer the movie rolls on.
Even the one thing you would expect to be a slam dunk, the musical sequences, becomes a slog to get through. When the clearly accomplished vocalists in the cast are allowed to perform stripped-back covers, they actually excel, but those moments are few and far between. Instead, we get obnoxiously loud, in-your-face songs that have been autotuned beyond anything resembling a natural sound, drowning out any semblance of genuine vocal ability. Even the production design of the big stage performances becomes an eyesore. From the blaring, flashing lights to the terrible mall stages, it all becomes one enormous assault on the senses for all the wrong reasons.
What’s painfully ironic is that Girl Group centers around people rediscovering their own voices, yet Rebel Wilson’s script is completely devoid of one of its own. Whether it aimed to be a crowd-pleaser or offer up nostalgia to those who grew up with Pitch Perfect, sadly, it completely misses the mark. A cheap and lousy imitation of the films that made Wilson a household name, Girl Group is quite comfortably the worst movie of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
