Girl Group review – Rebel Wilson’s dreadful music comedy is a spice-free wannabe

There were plentiful on-paper delights for certain music fans of a certain generation promised at Toronto’s splashy Friday-night premiere of pop comedy Girl Group. Posed as a tribute to the Spice Girls and the fizzy boom of girl power-fuelled music that came in their wake, its cast includes OG member Mel C, All Saints’ Shaznay Lewis, and Pussycat Dolls’ Ashley Roberts and Nicole Scherzinger while its soundtrack includes Glee-like covers of Destiny’s Child, En Vogue and Fifth Harmony, a feast for those who have recently felt famished. At a time when such music is still sadly rather thin on the ground, save for the manufactured kids pop of Katseye and the often effective yet more boutiquey throwback R&B of Flo, it seemed to be a reminder of how thrilling it all used to be back when such girl-pop supremacy felt impossibly never-ending, a form of nostalgia-bait that many of us could fully get behind.

But there are not enough pandering nods to the past that will get even the most dedicated pop girlie through the five-alarm catastrophe that unfolded for those of us who bravely decided to stay awake (someone in front of me wisely chose the release of sleep within the first 30 minutes). Hailing from Live Nation Studios, also behind the Weeknd’s roundly ridiculed vanity project Hurry Up Tomorrow, but lit and shot like a pharmaceutical commercial, it barely even feels like a real movie let alone one that should be premiering at such a prestigious festival. It’s the clumsy handiwork of Rebel Wilson, a once in-demand comedy star who has been trying to chase her career highs in the years since. In a theoretically admirable move, she’s moved behind the camera to take control and reintroduce the kind of broad comedies she used to be a part of before they faded from the mainstream. Her directorial debut, a cheap and cheerful adaptation of Australian stage musical The Deb, was ultimately best known for being the subject of a nasty and prolonged court case, but it showed us how Wilson saw herself as a film-maker and which of her films she was most eager to relive *coughs* Pitch Perfect *ends cough*. Girl Group sees her return once again to that territory – female friendship, musical numbers, unfriendly competition – but with even lesser results.

That’s partly down to Wilson now taking sole writing credit, and her scribbled-together script indulges her very worst impulses – tiresomely one-note bawdy jokes, unearned sugary sentiment, depressing attempts to relive former glories – and her strained journey to give us a new easy comfort film ends up feeling far too much like hard work. She plays Tassie, a former member of hit group Gurlfriends (made up of the aforementioned pop stars along with a game but above-this Sheridan Smith) who decided to leave in their prime, arrogantly assuming she could make it on her own. She fails miserably and years later, as the group reforms for a reunion tour, she’s shocked to discover, via a sleepwalking-on-Ambien Jennifer Coolidge, that she’s been replaced by Scherzinger’s ruthless super-fan. In a comedy so lacking in successful jokes that one starts to briefly, existentially panic, the one underused bit that does work is Scherzinger’s surprising willingness to poke fun at her monstrous persona. At the funeral of the girls’ school music teacher (played by a clearly lost Sally Hawkins), Scherzinger’s aggressive interloper decides to out-sing her fellow groupmates before she weeps in harmonised song. I smiled. Briefly.

Wilson’s aggrieved ex-star gets into a car crash after drinking in a laughably unconvincing idea of LA (the entire film was gauzily shot in the UK although it could be inside Sora for all I could tell) and is sentenced to community service, which lands her at a youth centre, which then leads her to a wannabe girl group, which then coincides with her finding out about some big competition and whatever.

It’s all too distractingly plasticky and haphazardly assembled to be taken seriously even as a throwaway plane comedy, which is about as high as it aims. Everything looks so grimly synthetic that one wonders if Wilson’s character died in the crash and we’re stuck in a version of hell that emulates the cheapest imaginable version of heaven. The bright spots only emerge when covers are being performed, and nothing original here has any power (Wilson performing Look at Me suggests the character is loosely based on Geri Halliwell, which feels unfair to Geri Halliwell). Like in The Deb, which at least benefited from a non-fabricated sense of location, Wilson tries to comment on the generational gap, this time critiquing an uneasy millennial obsession with overly sexualising young women, but it’s an idea that’s cheekily pointed at rather than explored with any depth. She has nothing of interest to say about anything and instead is content with lamely tracing over a formula set out previously by others, often in front of her (as well as Pitch Perfect, she cribs from a Bridesmaids set piece with a character needing an inopportune toilet break). The humour is base and consistently uninventive with Wilson assuming the mere mention of a tampon or a blowjob will have them rolling in the aisles. She also relies on a similarly simplistic score soundboard, hopelessly pressing the most obvious button for whatever mood is required. Imagine all of the care, detail and wit of the brilliant Girls5eva replaced with conference room lighting and dick jokes.

What Wilson doesn’t seem to understand is that her best movies – Bridesmaids and How to Be Single – cleverly weaved in anything more serious and emotional into the more raucous comedy without anyone seeing the joins. Here she so shamelessly switches gear that it’s hard to believe her intentions or buy her claims of authenticity. As an ode to the girl groups of our youth, it’s devoid of genuine affection (it was originally set to be a K-pop comedy until Wilson paid attention to the backlash), as evidence of what Live Nation Studios has in-store I would recommend a clear-eyed focus on the day job, and as proof of Wilson’s career to come, it’s a bleak simulacrum of what came before and a flashing red sign of what she’s just not able to do without better support. Like an overly confident yet entirely off-key tribute band, she just can’t reach those high notes.

• Girl Group is premiering at the Toronto film festival and is seeking distribution