The Star Wars prequels were fine.Before the sequels and direct-to-DVD spinoffs, before a dozen or so careers sputtered and/or took off in its wake, and well before the old gang got back together for American Reunion, the original American Pie was a revelation, however minor and derivative. Though sex-obsessed comedies about teenagers desperate to lose their virginities were nothing new even thirteen years ago, Pie bridged the raunchy-sweet wildness of the Farrelly Brothers and the regular-schlub raunch-with-heart of Judd Apatow. Since then, the series has been eclipsed, to a degree, by the inevitable advances in raunchy youth comedy: the Apatow-produced Superbad integrated its laughs and emotional core with greater naturalism and specificity, while the Harold and Kumar series, sort of a cousin to the Pie movies, added a more subversive spirit to gross-out gags.
It's Harold and Kumar screenwriters Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg who have come on board to write and direct this newest Pie installment, set over a long weekend as East Great Falls High throws a belated thirteen-year high school reunion. The occasion reunites high-school best friends Jim (Jason Biggs), Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas), Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas), Stifler (Seann William Scott), and even Oz (Chris Klein), who sat out the last installment, where Jim married his band-camp sweetheart Michelle (Alyson Hannigan).
Actually, you may recall that Stifler, at least in the first movie, was more of a supporting antagonist to the four boys. Over the course of the series, he's taken over in the style of an Urkel or a Fonzie; you get the sense that if the American Pie franchise hit an iceberg and the lifeboats only had room for two, those spots would go to Biggs and Scott (promoted to executive producer status for the fourth go-round!) without a second thought.
As contrived as it is to wedge Stifler into the lifelong-friends dynamic, it's understandable, too: Scott plays the alpha-jackass character with undeniable zeal, even infusing the adult Stifler, adrift as a temp and living at his mom's house, with the faintest glimmer of loneliness. The schtick may be warmed-over, but he gets some of the movie's biggest laughs, particularly when exacting revenge on a new generation of high-school jerks. It would be too easy to characterize them as younger versions of Stifler: the real thing represents a purer id.
Stifler is also the only one of the five guys who didn't spend the first movie angling to lose his virginity; this may have, strangely, given him a stronger sense of purpose over the long haul. Some of the more conventionally likable dudes become less interesting when unburdened with their virginities and attendant fears, perhaps because the relationships rendered with sweet earnestness in the original film get pointlessly revived here, adrift in so many scattered, disconnected storylines.
Finch, the pseudo-sophisticate of the group, gets a semblance of an interesting arc (finally moving on from his famous Stifler's Mom conquest of the first movie -- and, come to think of it, the second and the third), but it has to jostle for screentime with the married Kevin reconnecting with his first love Vicky (Tara Reid), and Oz, uh, reconnecting with his first love Heather (Mena Suvari). Klein suffers from the filmmakers' bizarre decision to make Oz a professional sports broadcaster; his celebrity diminishes the film's regular-dude concern and, moreover, Klein's credibility as an actor. Klein had a perfectly cast '99 with Election and the first American Pie, but he hasn't loosened up as an actor since then, which makes his supposed broadcasting career seem like a strange yet mostly untapped joke.
It would matter less if Hurwitz and Schlossberg found new ways of looking at these characters, particularly the former high school sweethearts. The first film was, in its way, surprisingly sex-positive, with plenty of input from the girls. Thirteen years later, the movie isn't sure what to do with all these women, who were given negligible subplots and cameos in the second movie, sat out in the smaller third, and return here looking a little dazed, gamely going through the motions (Natasha Lyonne, so tart as the voice of sarcastic reason in the first film, is relegated to a cheap revelation-joke walk-on). Even Hannigan, who began the series as an appealing cross between dork and sex bomb, now gets to be funnier and kinkier on her CBS sitcom than in her R-rated sex-comedy franchise: Michelle flips from mildly disapproving wife to semi-absent sidekick at the screenplay's convenience.
The sidelining happens in service of engineering classic Pie shenanigans for the hapless Jim. This time, rather than stumbling in pursuit of sex, he's pursued by Kara (Ali Cobrin), the girl next door he used to babysit, who just turned eighteen. Her semi-inexplicable desire for Jim leads to some amusing slapstick, though it's more a tribute to the grandest embarrassment set pieces of the series than a true attempt to top them. Like Adam Sandler (who Jim is told he resembles by Kara's disdainful, angry boyfriend), the series appears to have grown low-impact and slightly more conservative with age.
Yet the movie is amusing and watchable, about on par with the better moments of the other sequels, and generates some comfort from reviving its signature moments -- particularly the awkward father-son conversations between Jim and Noah Levenstein, better known as Jim's Dad (Eugene Levy), which have become affectionate ritual. More than ever, the series resembles those Levensteins: cute, likable, fumbling, and a little out of touch.
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