American Reunion

Jumping right into bullets here. So many disconnected thoughts.

• This is the first movie I've posted in more than four months. In that same amount of time I've watched 22 seasons of television, read five books, and beaten 27 video games. I can neither explain nor justify this, but it's something that should be noted.
• I really liked the first two American Pie movies, but I was eleven and thirteen, respectively, when they came out. I think the first one may have even been the first R-rated movie I saw, over at a friend's house. They're fairly stupid movies, filled to the brim with sex jokes and horrible plot holes, but when you're thirteen years old, what more do you want from a movie? Plus, Tara Reid was sort of attractive back then, and not a poster child for botched plastic surgery with her career in a tailspin.
• Looking back, the first movie at least had a little bit of fraternal camaraderie to it. Four bros make a pact to lose their virginity on prom night, and although farcical hijinks ensue, there's an undeniable feel-good element behind it all. Toss in the horribly awkward but sort of endearing father-son conversations shared by Eugene Levy and Jason Biggs, and you've got yourself a pretty decent high school movie.
• The second movie's plot was nearly nonexistent; the bros have been away at college and they want to live it up all summer long in a cabin by the lake. Most of the bros just want a second chance to fuck specific women, from Shannon Elizabeth to Stifler's mom. But again, the charm of the characters was enough for half-a-lifetime-ago me to enjoy the movie on its own merits.
• In 2003 came American Wedding, which wasn't even able to round up the whole cast. Chris Klein, Mena Suvari, Tara Reid, and Shannon Elizabeth had better things to do with their careers, apparently. (Here's a fun game to play for all four of these actors - check out their post-2003 filmographies on IMDb. There's a very real reason all four of them were willing and able to participate in American Reunion in 2012.) American Wedding wasn't very good. Half the cast was missing and the film's sole plot point was to get Jason Biggs and Alyson Hannigan married. It achieved this goal with an abundance of lazy jokes and tired character quirks.
• The franchise didn't die off even there, instead churning out four straight-to-DVD movies featuring no one from the first three movies but Eugene Levy. I never bothered with any of these and they were done by 2009.
• In 2012, this came out. It made perfect sense, really. I mean, holy shit, check out the DVD cover. So many familiar faces, and not one of them a movie star. I can't reiterate loudly enough how high this cast's average stock was back in 2001 or so, and thus how terribly they've fallen. Alyson Hannigan of How I Met Your Mother is easily the most successful actor of the bunch, and if not for Wilfred and Orange Is the New Black I'd be stuck wondering if any of these people had worked at all in the last five years. Anyway, I remember seeing the trailer for the movie, or at least hearing about it, and, recalling my own fondness for the movies as a teenager, I resolved to see it. I never did, and forgot about the entire franchise until...
• I found this movie for five bucks at Shaw's last week. I didn't know Shaw's sold movies and I haven't made an impulse buy like this - not online, but passing by a rack in a store - in years. Nor had I thought about the American Pie franchise in years. But suddenly the movie was in my basket next to some lettuce and orange juice, well on its way into my backlog.
• The movie has no reason to exist. I know you can glean that from its title and release date a good nine years after the original trilogy, but there's just nothing going on here. The whole graduating class of '99 is off to their 13-year reunion (why not ten? why not fifteen?) and we just spend a couple of hours with each of them - no more than half an hour with any one individual, I'm sure - learning what they've been up to and how depressing their early thirties have been. Biggs and Hannigan have a kid and a bad sex life, even though the first two movies suggested that Biggs was horny as hell and Hannigan was ridiculously sexually adventurous. Stifler just kind of casually sexually harasses women at work and his boss does not respect him. Chris Klein has become an ESPN talking head and thus a "big deal" but he has no connection to his starfucker girlfriend. Good thing ex-girlfriend Mena Suvari is at the reunion, stuck in a similarly unfulfilling relationship! Kevin is happily married but, shit, he's run into Tara Reid. Can he possibly enjoy seeing his ex-girlfriend without being a weirdo about it? (That's more or less his entire arc in American Pie 2, too.) Finch is still an eclectic goofball, but this time around Stifler bangs his mom. Jim's dad is hapless in the wake of Jim's mom's death, but he does share a night with Stifler's mom. And Shannon Elizabeth, the Shermanator, and Natasha Lyonne each show up for five-minute cameos designed to remind the audience what their gimmicks in the first two films were.
• All this is fine, and not even a dumb reason to make a movie. Before Sunset and Before Midnight exist solely to check in on the lives of the two people who met and talked the night away in Before Sunrise. Make no mistake, I'm not comparing this movie's merits to those movies at all; just saying that, "let's see what the characters from that long ago movie are doing these days" isn't an inherently terrible movie. "Reunion" is right there in the title and all. But the film's biggest misstep is easily the introduction of the current senior high school class, who serve as rivals and foils for our own guys. Jim's next door neighbor, who he used to babysit for, is now eighteen, and just throwing herself at Jim because she had a crush on him fifteen years ago. (This makes no goddamn sense. Attractive eighteen-year-olds do not want to take a ride on married guys who look like Jason Biggs.) Furthermore, the girl's boyfriend and his bros become the villains of the movie by default, even though Jason Biggs wants nothing to do with her in the first place. This whole unrealistic set-up is just a way to get some "end of Act 2 tension" into the film. Of course Alyson Hannigan would be upset to see drunken naked teens throwing themselves at her husband. Of course the teenage dickhead bros will crash Stifler's party.
• There's a modicum of self awareness to the whole thing, with the guys getting at least a little perturbed by the fact that, at thirty, they just can't have the awesome parties they once did anymore. But again, this was kind of sort of the theme of American Pie 2 - "Guys, we're getting older, and we're all going to drift apart. Best to have this last summer blowout to end things with a bang!" That was in 2001, when these guys were ostensibly twenty.
• All in all, this movie was exactly what I expected it to be, and really, all I could have hoped for it to be. I'd give it a C-minus, but the very faint nostalgic twinge that made me pick up and purchase this movie in the first place bumps that up to a C-plus or so.
• Here's waiting with bated breath for 2019's American Hangover, in which which the guys, closing in on forty, once again swear that they can't keep partying like this.