Going to TIFF, I often take on movies I am not sure how I will feel about, but I always try to go in with an open mind. Even with that open mind, Girl Group managed to disappoint and feel like a cheap imitation of better films in the genre. Considering Rebel Wilson was in Pitch Perfect, this film feels particularly odd, failing to deliver enough that is new or interesting to make it worth watching. At the end of the day, it was one of the worst films I saw at TIFF 2026.
Rebel Wilson takes the lead as Tassie Young, a washed-up member of a former girl group that feels very much like the film’s take on the Spice Girls. Having grown up with this group of girls since high school, Tassie has been with them from the beginning, and Girl Group wastes no time showcasing the rise and fall of the group and how she played a large part in its collapse. Fast-forward to the present day, Tassie is down on her luck; most of her recent projects have failed miserably and her manager (Jennifer Coolidge) is largely avoiding her, even as her old group plans a reunion tour that replaces her with Nicole Scherzinger.
That clearly leads her into a self-destructive spiral, resulting in a DUI and court-ordered community service, where she needs to mentor young women under the care of Randall Park’s character. Never missing an opportunity to push her own career forward, she quickly takes on the task of mentoring them, trying to turn the group into what she thinks the industry wants and losing the magic that made this ragtag group of girls special in the process. What follows is a paint-by-numbers series of events that includes plenty of musical numbers, cameos and gags about the actual pop music industry, but very little actual substance.
The concept is not a bad one, and with some of the ideas at the heart of Girl Group, this movie shows potential during its first few minutes. That hope is quickly dashed, however, with each new segment feeling more interested in making winks and nods to the audience than telling a legitimate story. There are some attempts to flesh out the cast, but even those do this young, talented group a disservice.
No one beyond Rebel Wilson’s Tassie Young is given enough time to really be fleshed out as a character, with many of the others reduced to one-note jokes and concepts. I often forgot some of them were even in the group until they said something. It can be hard to make an ensemble like this work, but Girl Group fails to give me a reason to care about the goals they set out to achieve, especially since it is shown time and again that these girls did not want any of these things before Tassie Young entered the mix.
Rebel Wilson does her thing, and it is serviceable, but she never expands beyond that, leaving her performance as little more than a series of jokes about how broken and unsuccessful her character is throughout the film. That can be funny in small doses, but when it continues to be the only real joke about her character, it does not work. I was more bored than anything.
Randall Park is criminally underutilized in Girl Group, with his entire performance literally totaling less than 15 minutes of screen time. He is relegated to coming on screen, making an odd joke about the community centre or his life, and then exiting stage left, with his character adding little of substance to the story. I enjoy his acting and the roles he takes on when he is given room to breathe, but this feels very much like a Rebel Wilson vehicle, and that is what Girl Group is going to give us, whether we like it or not.
The music delivers some fun songs, but I will be honest, even a day after I left the theatre, not a single one was still in my head. Even the song they kept repeating throughout the film was forgotten by the time I walked out of the theatre, which surprised me since it was played over the end credits. With a movie focused on music and the music industry, you need some bops you can remember after the credits roll, but I do not think this is a soundtrack many people will load up on Spotify anytime soon.
Girl Group is a failure on all fronts, coming nowhere close to what Pitch Perfect did for the genre. There are some good moments, and some of the performances were fun, but the movie as a whole was a total failure for me. For fans of the genre, it may be worth a watch if and when it comes to streaming, but even at its brisk one-hour, 36-minute runtime, it felt like a slog. Even the fun moments could not stop me from incessantly checking my watch to see how much time was left.
