AMERICAN REUNION (Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg). 113 minutes. Opens Friday (April 6). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NN
Has it really been 13 years since Jason Biggs boned that pie? Yes, it has, and American Reunion is here to tell you that everyone’s gotten a little older and a lot less interesting. American Reunion demonstrates, for all of its gross-out pranks and wacky misunderstandings, that the American Pie franchise really only needed to be two movies long (at most).
Reuniting the entire cast of the original film (including Chris Klein, who sat out the third one) for a largely pointless vehicle that finds our heroes facing their Carlsberg years with a mixture of exhaustion and confusion, it’s an empty vessel drained of almost all the warmth and goodwill generated by the original breakout hit way back in 1999.
Directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, best known for writing the Harold & Kumar trilogy, seem content to just throw various characters together and follow them around for 10 to 15 minutes at a time. This strategy only reminds us how little those characters’ relationships were developed over the course of the series, and how they’re not being developed any further here. (Kevin and Vicky, Oz and Heather, we’re looking at you.)
Meanwhile, other characters feel like pale imitations of themselves: Jim’s wife, Michelle, so cheerfully weird (and so appealingly frisky) in the earlier films, is now pretty much exactly the same generic-spouse character Alyson Hannigan plays on How I Met Your Mother.
That said, it’s nice to see that the awkward chemistry between Biggs and Eugene Levy remains intact, Eddie Kaye Thomas continues his remarkable Nicolas Cage impression as the enigmatic Finch, and Seann William Scott does some amazing things with his face as id-monster Stifler. But those are only fleeting moments of pleasure in a very long, empty movie, which manages to waste not only the bulk of the returning cast members but such talented newbies as 30 Rock’s Katrina Bowden, Better Off Ted’s Jay Harrington, Chuck’s Vik Sahay, Quarantine’s Dania Ramirez and How I Met Your Mother’s Charlene Amoia.
Trust me, this isn’t how you want to remember this series. Go have some dessert and think of better days, or something.
normw@nowtoronto.com
