American Pie

The main complaint I have with this movie is that the characters have hormones but no identity. The way I knew them was: there’s the one with the weird dad; there’s the one with a fake sensitive side; there’s the one with the attractive girlfriend; and there’s the one with rumors floating around about his sex life. If I do recall, one of the character’s names was Finch. If I think hard enough maybe I can get a few more, but I shouldn’t have to think about it, I should know it. If there was one singular flaw with this movie, I would say this was it. The script doesn't allow us to associate with the characters. Actually I'd say that there are far too many characters for a movie of this length to handle.

But there isn't only one flaw. There are many. The acting, Jason Biggs aside, leaves much to be desired. I never believed any of the characters when they said "I love you," or, more aptly, "I want to have sex with you." Biggs did a surprisingly convincing job given what his hormones, I mean script writers, gave him. The dialogue the actors are given is so crude and so banal, that it's hard to deliver its lines with a straight face. It's clear that the scriptwriter thought he had something masterful in his hands, something that could truly have been a critique of the current teenage generation.

Don’t get me wrong, the first half was actually pretty funny. Some of the jokes were fun but mostly unoriginal. The jokes that were more inventive had better results. One of their “bigger” jokes, or at least was supposed to be, lost a lot of steam because of the undeniable connection to last the (overrated) hit, There’s Something About Mary. More than just that one joke was stolen from the Farrely Brothers' hit. I fear what Mary has done. It undoubtedly will lead to more and more movies with teenage sexuality as their focus.

Unfortunately, this movie tries to flourish and gain laughs by bringing to light every sterotype associated with High School: Jocks rule the school; band geeks talk about band camp and play in the hallways; all Europeans want is sex; and choir is full of prissy boys and girls. Spotting each and every one of these, and the attempts to capitalize on them by poking fun, turned out to be more annoying than funny.

Parents are so worried nowadays about what’s getting into their children’s heads. I suspect this was the reason the movie had to end on such a politically correct tone. If they had just kept some of the craziness of the first half, this would have been more fun. The ending causes my overall impression of the film to suffer drastically. It went from a somewhat humorous critique on teenage life to a shameful morality tale. Somehow, however, I still had a mildly amusing two hours in the theater. Low-brow comedy of this type doesn't usually fall into my taste as much as a lot of people's so to say that I had a decent time says something.

This movie’s tagline was “The return of the great American sex comedy.” It definitely tried but didn't quite succeed.

On a scale of 1 to 10 cups of beer with extra “suds”: 6