Hilarious film with great musical numbers but underdeveloped characters

Rating: 5/10 (19 May 2015)

First, the good: This film was WAY better than the trailers. I was very wary of this film after seeing its promotional material. A lot of the 'jokes' from the trailers don't even make it into the film.
In fact, this is probably the funniest actual comedy I've seen from this year. It's provides more laughs than Paul Blart, Kingsman, Get Hard, Hot Pursuit, and Home and it provides less cringe-worthy failed attempts at humor than Spongebob. However, it's hard to compare its comedy to the surprisingly funny non-comedies Age of Ultron and Furious 7.
As for the musical performances, you either like them or you don't. I liked them a lot, but music, being as subjective as it its, is hard to adequately defend or criticize. But I will say, that the performances are much much better than previewed from the trailers. It makes me wonder why they chose to market this film the way that they did.
Now for the bad: 4 of the 8 main Bellas were completely one dimensional and static characters. What makes it worse, despite Fat Amy proudly championing how ethnically diverse their 5/8 Caucasian group was, the non-flat half of the group were all white.
The other half of the characters could all be summed up in less than 5 words: pretty and promiscuous, weird and creepy, black butch lesbian, Hispanic from dangerous country. This is something I noticed early on in the film. I asked myself if any of these 4 characters would show a personality outside of these one-note traits. The only bits of dialogue from them that didn't fit neatly into the single trait characterization was filler exposition like "Why are we here again?" or "Who is that over there?" which could be said by any character. This is the kind of thing I would overlook in a tongue-in-cheek camp-type film like Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, but the attempted sentimentality in Pitch Perfect 2 should have required more developed characters.
Overall I give it 3.5/5 or 7/10.