Pitch Perfect 2 is … well … imperfect. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a fun film with a ton of great moments, all serviceably directed by cast member Elizabeth Banks, but with no discernible center to ground the hijinks.

I have a theory that a box office souffle of a comedy should never have a sequel. Legally Blonde 2. Miss Congeniality 2. Ghostbusters 2.  The Hangover, Part II. Evan Almighty? They just don’t hold. There was a complete thought (albeit slight) conveyed in the first film that was never intended to continue, and, consequently, the second installment comes off as an unnecessary cash grab with less script, more marketing.

Pitch Perfect 2, to its credit, somewhat avoids that trap, chiefly because the ensemble cast is so sharp and so game. The first film benefited from a clear raison d’etre (other than being a saucier Glee knock-off): Anna Kendrick (so zippy, luminous, and arch) doesn’t want to go to college; she wants to be a DJ; her folks are forcing her to go to a dorky liberal arts college because her father teaches there and everything is subsidized. Totally believable.

The comedy comes from her exasperation with her surroundings, and her love of music that can only be satiated by her participation in the dorkiest of past-times: a cappella singing groups/competitions. Along the way, she meets cute with a boy who sings with a competing team, and the whole schmear gets postmodern Love Finds Andy Hardy resolved with a climactic performance that unites girl/boy/female empowerment/a cappella VICTORY!

The sequel, alas, has no such formula to follow, other than a contrived premise that a presidentially viewed wardrobe malfunction from the otherwise charming “Fat Amy” (delightful Rebel Wilson) forces the Barden Bellas in their senior year to chase down a world championship in order to reinstate their aca-standing. Really, the plot (or lack thereof) doesn’t much matter. Go for the luminous turns by Kendrick, Wilson, Brittany Snow, newcomer Hailee Steinfeld, and their other cast-mates, and stay for the bonkers medleys of forgotten chestnuts by Sir Mix-a-Lot, Carrie Underwood, and Vanessa Carlton.

The most delightful addition to this mixed bag remix of the first film is Das Sound Machine, the mirthlessly Teutonic rivals to our intrepid Bellas. Their costumes look like a cheap roadshow of Sam Mendes’ kinky mid-90s Cabaret re-boot, all naughty fishnets and pleather skirts, and their militant takes on such … er … classics as Kriss Kross’ “Jump Jump” are a riot. (“Der Kommissar will make you jump, jump. Da Deutschland will make you jump, jump.”)

Yes, Elizabeth Banks and John Michael Higgins return as acidic announcers, whose own failed a cappella careers have led them to offer nothing but excoriatingly inappropriate critiques of these earnestly inept singing groups. At one point, they sniff, “Yes, here we have women too ugly to be cheerleaders.” (Does anyone every really like cheerleaders? Even cheerleaders themselves?)

What the Pitch Perfect films do so well (other than making me giggle foolishly over the cheekily crude jokes, which I then promptly forget) is simultaneously lampoon and celebrate the bizarre “art” of a cappella competition. Why anyone would take pop songs that barely hold water and arrange them for painfully earnest voice-only performance I will never understand. And that is the chief comic currency of these films. The filmmakers know that this genre is effing weird but totally charming and they honor that tradition brilliantly.

And the thing Pitch Perfect 2 does remarkably well is show a group of young women as people. Gender is irrelevant in this film as the cast members joke, play, fight, love as humans – messy, silly, kind, anxious humans. That is ever-revelatory, and a great reason to take your kids to see this lightweight summer lark. As our heroes sing in the film’s less-than-triumphant finale, “Girls run the world, yeah.” Let’s hope so. I’d like to live in that world.

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Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital) In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the first book is currently is being carried by Bookbound, Common Language Bookstore, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room in Ann Arbor, Michigan and by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan. My mom Susie Duncan Sexton’s Secrets of an Old Typewriter series is also available on Amazon and at Bookbound and Common Language.