American Reunion

American Reunion is one of those movies that you’d expect would fail because it is the fourth sequel in the long dead original American Pie franchise.  Surprisingly though, the fourth entry in this series proves to be the funniest the series has ever been.  American Reunion sees all of your favorite characters from American Pie like Jim, Michelle, Finch, Oz, Stifler, Kevin and Heather all return for their high schools 13 year reunion.  Jim, Finch, Oz, Kevin and Stifler are all contemplating whether they made the right decisions for their life once they graduated from college.  Some of the boys have done well for themselves and others feel a bit lonely and long for the glory days of high school when they were popular.  Jim and his wife Michelle are having problems in their marriage because they have been unable to have sex since their son Evan was born.  Before the reunion begins Jim is reintroduced to a girl named Kara who he babysat as a teenager.  She is obsessed with making Jim the person she shares her first time with and Jim has to decline and avoid her throughout the film.  The other storylines of the film are pretty basic and Jim’s plot is the one that gets the most laughs.  

In an ironic turn of events as much as I hate the character of Steven Stifler, he is the character I ended up caring about most.  Stifler was always the life of the party in the American Pie films and in this story Stifler is a nobody because he is the guy that is constantly trapped in high school.  To be honest, I know guys like him and to see it depicted on screen so well by actor Sean William Scott hurt a bit more because I know people like him.  I found myself constantly pulling for Stifler’s friends to cut him a break while simultaneously hating Stifler for his gross level of immaturity.  Another positive of this film is that all of the characters are fully fleshed out now so there’s no need for the plot to pander to the audience by educating them on the backstory of each character.  At no point in the film did I feel like any of the characters had no personality.  This is one of the few cases in cinema where keep characters exactly the same as they were 10 years ago is a good thing.

The one major negative of the film is that naturally with a film that has so many characters not all of them are going to get a decent storyline.  Alyson Hannigan’s Michelle only storyline is that she wants sex with her husband and isn’t getting any.  Personally I believe that suspicions of infidelity would have tied in nicely with Kara’s pursuit of Jim.  The writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg who also directed the film and co-created the Harold and Kumar trilogy elected not to go that route.  I believe the pacing slows down in the last third of the movie and when I’m watching a comedy I want hilarity to ensue until the credits roll.

Regardless of problems American Reunion is a very satisfying final piece of pie and Jason Biggs (Jim) and Sean William Scott (Stifler) who executive produced the film should be happy because they did fans of the franchise proud.