If you’re feeling a little skeptical about American Reunion, the fourth go around for the original cast of the American Pie franchise, don’t worry, it appears they were just as disinterested. Jim (Jason Biggs), Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas), Oz (Chris Klein), Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) and Stifler (Seann William Scott) are back and all grown up, but while they may have matured as people, their characters haven’t. You can almost hear each actor saying, “I’m too old for this s–t,” with every line spoken. The lack of excitement oozes out of the screen as the late ’90s comedy tries it’s hardest to fit into a world dominated by Judd Apatow productions, which is to say humping a warm apple pie is no longer considered “funny” but showing your penis smashed against your thigh courtesy of a glass top lid apparently is. Yes, that happens. No, it’s not funny.
The story kicks off with brief glimpses into the lives of our five leads. Jim is now married to Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) and since their baby was born their sex life is on the rocks; Kevin is married as well; Oz is a primetime sportscaster with a model for a girlfriend (Katrina Bowden); Finch has been missing for some time; and Stifler is still just as immature as ever, having made nothing of his life and now working as an office temp. And all of their separate lives are about to come back together for their 13 year high school reunion. You better prepare yourself.
Jim and Michelle hope to get a little alone time, Jim is being stalked by the horny 18-year-old (Ali Cobrin) he used to babysit, Kevin and Oz have their own issues once reunited with their high school sweethearts Vicky (Tara Reid) and Heather (Mena Suvari), Finch finds love that isn’t Stifler’s mom (Jennifer Coolidge) and Stifler is here to make a mess of everything.
For a franchise that was once comedically innovative it now looks like a dinosaur. Written and directed by Harold and Kumar duo Hayden Schlossberg and Jon Hurwitz, the two depend on nostalgia and playing off old jokes like a pair of comedy archaeologists. When they do try and venture out on their own it’s as if they’re marking off a checklist of “modern” punch lines as if they haven’t an original idea in their head. And even when they do manage to come close to hitting on something, the performances are wooden and they resort to explaining their own jokes, killing any comedy they might have earned.
As an example, the five guys are sitting around drinking beers, catching up and reading lines from the script with zero effort to actually act. The old year book comes out and when they get to the senior quotes it’s, “Huh, huh, what?” one of them asks. “It’s some cheesy quote we gave about where we wanted to be in ten years,” Oz says with zero inflection, interest or manner of humanity. “What, did you write something cheesy?” Kevin asks as we are now going around the table giving everyone a chance to say something obvious as if we’re an audience of 2-year-olds.
After everyone has read their quote we get to Jim. He hesitates and then, “I hope to have the sex life of Ricky Martin.” The audience laughs, the joke works and then Klein, while reminding us why his career went nowhere, ruins it by saying, “Bet you didn’t expect him to end up gay.” As a good friend of mine would say in such an instance, “Ruined it.” If Schlossberg and Hurwitz didn’t think the audience would get the joke, the answer isn’t to explain it, just don’t write it. The fun is sucked out of this thing with a hack script and performances from the leads that led me to believe they wished they could just take their paychecks and leave.
The effort level from most everyone involved ranges from trying too hard (Seann William Scott) to not trying at all (Thomas Ian Nicholas), but can you really blame them. Just like its audience, the American Pie actors have all moved on. Most are hardly in films anymore and even those who have kept on acting are largely seen in television sitcoms. Coming back to this franchise, they are relying just as heavily on the audience’s familiarity with the characters as the filmmakers, and it just doesn’t work.
If any laughs are to be had, most come from Eugene Levy playing Jim’s father and while Scott really is trying too hard, Stifler still has his moments for those of us that remember laughing at his antics 13 years ago. But the laughs beyond that point are limited as you and your friends could get together and write these lines yourself and act them out in your living room to just as much effect.
I hoped this could be funny and I wouldn’t have thought it would be that hard. As a matter of fact, once the reunion came around at the end of the film I realized the characters had finally matured to the level they should have reached when the film started. It was also the only time we see Natasha Lyonne and Shannon Elizabeth, which is to say that once the whole gang finally gets back together the towel is thrown in, a towel that should have been thrown from the start.
