Pleasantly Surprised

Rating: 7/10 (16 January 2018)

I am not a fan of either musicals or of chick flicks. So I was pleasantly surprised when I finally saw this movie and found it to be pretty fun. Well strictly speaking, this one's not exactly a musical. It's like a movie with songs. If you start calling this a musical then all of Bollywood is basically musicals. But whatever the technical term, the movie is fun.
1) The story line has nothing new to offer and is basically what any college competition based movie would offer. So no points for the movie in this space.
2) The characters aren't developed well. For example, the main character Beca is a sort of dark and lonely character which the story offers no explanation for except that the parents got divorced. The other characters aren't even worked on at all.
3) The casting is great for everyone except Anna Kendrick. She looks uncomfortable in a lot of places, and her face seems really weird when she sings sometimes. But Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson), Chloe (Brittany Snow) and Jesse (Skylar Astin) are totally adorable.
4) The music is, as you'd expect from a movie about music, pretty good. It is the music and the humor that drives this movie through and through.
5) The direction of the movie was pretty ordinary. There wasn't much scope for great stuff either. So job well done. Although one thing they failed to do was create the tension before the last performance. We have all seen a lot of college movies, the protagonists most often end up winning. But they could have at least tried to show it in a different way.
Overall I would suggest that if you like movies that are simply fun, you'll like this one the same.