Thirteen years after the first “American Pie,” two sequels and four straight-to-DVD spin-offs, Jim, Stifler and the rest of the gang are back for another round of crude jokes about sex, nudity and poop in “American Reunion.”
The film revisits the original cast nine years after the events of the last film during their high school reunion. Although no one exactly asked for another sequel, the film is surprisingly good and even manages to probe some adult issues.
The film begins in Jim (Jason Biggs, “My Best Friend’ Girl”) and Michelle’s (Alyson Hannigan, “How I Met Your Mother”) bedroom with them rocking the bed. Only, instead of having sex, they are putting their kid to sleep.
The couple has been having trouble with intimacy lately given their busy lives. On the weekend of their high school reunion, they plan to reconnect in the bedroom while reuniting with old friends from high school.
The film then spends a good 20 minutes reintroducing us to the gang of friends: Oz (Chris Klein, “Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li”), now a sportcaster; Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas, “Please Give Me”), a stay-at-home dad; and Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas, “A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas”), now a world-traveler.
Needless to say, after the introduction, the film gets raunchy.
As with every “American Pie” film, it is customary to be inundated with filthy images of people having sex, some juvenile pooping scene and even flashes of breasts and other private parts.
Most of the shenanigans in the film are courtesy of Stiffler (Seann William Scott, “Role Models”), who is still as wonderfully idiotic, inappropriate and shamelessly stuck in high school as ever.
Even Jim’s dad (Eugene Levy, “Taking Woodstock”) is just as hilarious and wise. Both Scott and Levy provide consistent laughter and steal scenes most of the time from the rest of the cast.
That said, some of the jokes are flat, and some lifeless characters bog down the comedy too often.
Most problematic and annoying of the returning characters are Vicky (Tara Reid, “Scrubs”) and Heather (Mena Suvari, “American Beauty”) who add little dimension to their roles. They do not say anything funny and are mostly stuck with uninteresting stories.
Even the new characters, the high school kids, function more like stock figures meant to create some conflict.
For all of the minor characters’ inadequacies, what is surprising about this film is how mature the story is compared to the three previous films.
It plays on the theme of nostalgia as all the characters, in one way or another, deal with dissatisfaction in their current personal and professional lives that they never expected when they were younger.
Their dissatisfaction is the catalyst for them to reexamine their high school lives, whether it is past romances or past glories.
In the end, that’s what makes “American Reunion” a good movie. It captures a moment that everyone goes through and examines it thoroughly while still being indecently hilarious.
thescene@theeagleonline.com
