American Pie 2

As much as it probably pains you to read this, American Pie 2 has all the ingredients of a bad movie. It's another one of those box-office driven sequels where the original story does not really demand a sequel. The first AP finished with a stupid, yet conclusive finale. A sequel is completely unnecessary. However, the studio saw dollar signs, lots of them, and decided to green light a sequel. They threw together a script and a production crew and managed to retain the entire original cast.

The script, written by the scribe of the original, manages to find nothing new to make fun of. Instead, it relies more and more on gross-out gags to make the audience laugh. These situations have all been done countless of times before, oftentimes with better, funnier results. AP2 falls so heavily into cliche and direct copying of other film's jokes that it got to be more entertaining counting how many times I had seen that particular sequence before than actually laughing at the jokes that were supposed to be funny but weren't.

The director of this film, J.D. Rogers, was actually the assistant director for the first film. I'm forced to wonder why they couldn't get the original directors to do the sequel. My guess, and this is based on no research into the matter, is that the co-directors read an early script, saw almost no hope of making an actual good movie and then gave their blessings and received executive producer credits for it. Executive producers don't really do anything except construct the idea. Their involvement, I can virtually guarantee you, was almost non-existent.

Everyone in the cast returned to the sequel. This isn't suprising, not because the script is any good or the people making it are particularly talented, but because they probably don't have any offers to do anything else! Since the first AP film, each of the principles have been in multiple other films and each one promptly tanked at the box-office. It's obvious that without each other they're nothing to the rest of the world. In addition, some of the characters (the three girls especially) have such pathetically small parts in this sequel that its easy to deduce that they're working on other projects instead. Their scheduling was perhaps rigorous during AP2's production and the fact that they didn't really try to show up anymore shows how much care they have for the project. I think I can safely say that they agreed to be in the sequel with the sole purpose of giving their careers for other films a shot in the arm.

Which, of course, is a wise decision. It's obvious that the ideas centering around this bunch of characters have grown thin. This sequel is much less involving than the occasionally charming original. All of the best jokes in this film are reminiscent on the first film's gags. More so, the formula used in the first is copied exactly into the second. It's depressing to see how far from unique American Pie 2 really is. It's also depressing to see virtually every audience member seemingly rolling in the aisles laughing at jokes that are just unfunny. It's very possible that you'll enjoy this film, everyone else did in abundance. I sure didn't, but whatever you do, don't claim that this sequel is better than the original (something I've heard several times already). While the original was nothing special, it's clearly a superior film. What was inventive then has become pointless drivel, blurring the identification lines between each of the films. In retrospect, I think the sequel hurts my opinion of the first film because I can longer remember why I laughed at some of the jokes.

On a scale of 1 to 10 golden showers : 4