THE STORY – A washed up girl band singer seeks redemption by tutoring a group of outcast girls to pop stardom.
THE CAST – Rebel Wilson, Randall Park, Sheridan Smith, Melanie Chisholm, Nicole Scherzinger, Jamie-Lee O’Donnell, Shaznay Lewis, Ashley Roberts, Judi Love, Guz Khan, Chabely Ponce, Daniela Couso, Lilah Pate, Mia Kaplan, Bailey Stender, Loren Gray, Miracle Washington, Ana Yi Puig, Keith Duffy, Chris Colfer, Bechill, Jolene, Sally Hawkins & Jennifer Coolidge
THE TEAM – Rebel Wilson (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 103 Minutes
Tassie Young, played by Rebel Wilson, is washed up after being a girl band pop sensation in the late 1990s in a model of the Spice Girls. In 2026, her former group is reuniting but does not want her, so she seeks to recover her former glory by tutoring a young motley crew of aspiring singers in East LA. Hilarity supposedly ensues, except it does not, and the TIFF World Premiere “Girl Group” feels more like Wilson’s attempt to recapture the glory of the comedies that made her famous – think “Pitch Perfect” and “Bridesmaids” – but spectacularly crashing and burning along the way.
“Girl Group” opens in an all-girls preparatory school in 1997, where a supportive teacher played by an underused Sally Hawkins tells five of her young students to “explode” onstage in a rendition of the Spice Girls. There is a talent scout in the audience (played by Chris Colfer, in an allusion to “Glee”) and the quintet is soon discovered. They are lead by a gap-toothed Tassie, who has dared to dream big. After a meteoric rise, Tassie decides to go it alone, to predictably disastrous results. Fast-forward two cruel decades later, and Tassie is a boozed-up, washed-out has-been, unable to recapture her former fame. But when another night of drunk driving lands her in community service, her unimpressionable manager (played by Jennifer Coolidge, another underutilized talent), asks her to help a group of misfit girls try to get their act together.
This set-up is as far as it goes and “Girl Group” could have been a decent film, even if you can tell exactly what will happen next. But, in fact, you do not know what will happen next. The films that “Girl Group” is molded upon may follow a predictable story arc of failure and redemption, but at least they are funny. This film is decidedly not. Some of the cringe-inducing lines include that the name of one of the singer’s little girl is “hashtag-baby, hyphenated,” or having Scherzinger purposefully mispronounce “current” to eat the three middle letters. Do not take our word for it alone. The always-receptive, permissive audience at TIFF was uncharacteristically silent for most of the runtime. After the TIFF World Premiere of this film, Wilson told the audience that the original cut of “Girl Group” was three hours long because they had so many jokes. One wonders whether she cut off the wrong ones, or how uninspiring the other ones were. One wonders what exactly TIFF was thinking in showcasing this film as a major World Premiere to open the festival. One wonders what the audience score will be.
When it is not attempting unamusing comedy, “Girl Group” tries to bootstrap itself onto other themes of empowerment that its title would suggest. The young group of girls rightly points out to Tassie that her generation’s idea of female liberation and empowerment were anything but. They are right, of course, especially after Tassie shows them the hyper-sexualized music videos
of the 1990s. But “Girl Group” treats most of these ideas as lip service, boxes to check along the way to the ultimate goal of providing irreverent laughs and double entendres (which, again, the movie does not do). Another theme is the idea that girls should not fight each other viciously, even in these competitions, as they may have done in “Pitch Perfect” or other such 1990s/2000s movie. With the outcome preordained, however, it becomes harder for the audience to root for a story that is already predictable to begin with.
The movie’s best moments are without question the various dance numbers, staged at malls, boxing training rings, and grand stages alike. It’s most amazing sequence is when Tassie’s girls, now calling themselves “Explode,” stage a wholly original number with mismatched costumes and little fanfare, and Wilson manages to convince you that this number is far more worthy than a perfectly choreographed rendition of a classic Destiny’s Child song, full of bells and whistles. The film’s original conceit, which is to have fun with music and dance, becomes somewhat visible among the smog of forced and unhumorous gags. The filmmakers would have done better to let the singing do the talking, than the laughing do the talking. Scherzinger is somewhat of a revelation as a comedic performer here, but that role, too, is underbaked. Wilson insists in occupying center stage, not unlike her character Tassie, and her comedic range is visibly constrained by her own inability to play any of it straight.
Ultimately, “Girl Group” is a movie about rediscovering one’s voice that never quite finds its own. There is a sweeter, scrappier, music-driven comedy buried somewhere beneath the overworked gags and obvious redemption beats, and every so often – usually when the undoubtedly talented cast Wilson assembled the world over is actually singing and dancing – it threatens to break through. But Wilson keeps dragging the film back to Tassie’s shtick, and the result is a comedy that talks loudly about many themes while offering little that feels genuinely fresh, funny, or alive. For a movie built around the idea of exploding onstage, “Girl Group” fizzles.
