'If there was more dancing in the world, there'd be fewer wars'. Interesting conceit, but I think ultimately foolhardy. Besides, dancing was banned under the Taliban, wasn't it? War in Afghanistan, therefore, technically liberated a people so that they may dance should they wish to; war equating, in this instance, to the right to dance. But I digress. "American Reunion" isn't about dancing, although there is a little bit of it in there; at its core seems to be the question as to whether sexual intercourse is for procreation or recreation, epitomised in a narrative about a sexless, though certainly not loveless, marriage between two people who already have one child and cannot quite find the spark they once had.
I was never of the opinion that there was anything especially nefarious about the "American Pie" films of 1999 to 2003; they were merely a goofy product of our system and its attitudes, not a source of them. Certainly, at the centre of the first film was a lesson about what happened when you allowed certain attitudes to consume you; when you charged into the great unknown ill-prepared because you felt you had to more-so because you wanted to. The other two were, broadly speaking, mere farces and didn't have an especially good idea of what to do with themselves.
This 2012 effort, "American Reunion", the second best in the series, is somewhat different. It depicts the East Grand Rapids High School gang as actual adults: some are married; some are fathers, most of them work but all are a long way from where they want to be. Shedding their virginities all those years ago on a prom night under a self-imposed air of coming of age, or rite of passage, did not make them millionaires or land them ideal life-situations.
The franchise has taken a gear-change in this respect, though it stops well short of opening with a Cormac McCarthy-esque monologue read in the style of Tommy Lee-Jones; trying instead to distinguish between what life for 16-18 year olds is like in 2012 compared to the dying embers of last century and the first few years of the new one. It has one of the crew, Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas), verbally outline how things have changed: girls are looser; young people are ruder and social networking has taken relations to a whole new level. What he neglects to point out is that if social media had existed fifteen years earlier, his generation would have used it in exactly the same fashion because the underlying issue is one of morality and not modernity.
As is form, the film revolves around the character of Jim (Jason Biggs), who, after the last film, is married to Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) and has an infant son. The film depicts two major factors in Jim's life combining over the timespan of one weekend: his frustration at possessing a sexless marriage and his high-school reunion, where the class of '99 and all the old faces are set to congregate back in the old Michigan town of East Great Falls. Backing up the central narrative are various stories involving the old crew: Oz (Chris Klein), whose first lines after missing the last film are "...and we're back!"; Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas); the aforementioned Kevin and the irreplaceable Stifler (Seann William Scott).
Arriving home to stay with his Dad, portrayed of course by Eugene Levy, temptation drops head-first into Jim's life in the form of Kara (Ali Cobrin), the girl next door whom he used to babysit but has now grown up into his own personal siren. We can tell he likes her because the film shoots her running over her lawn from Jim's gaze, a common technique to establish degrees of erotic wanting in a character. Our alarm bells continue to ring when we recall that the pornography Jim was looking at before the trip was college girl themed and that Kara fits this demographic. Admittedly, it is somewhat amusing to see the film transgress Jim's behaviour after, having been desperate for female contact the first time we met him, must now dead-bat female attention when it is she who possesses the societal urge to shed HER virginity.
Flimsier is the sub-plot to do with Oz who, for reasons of requiring a beefier runtime, gets his own story to do with bumping into his old girlfriend - the film-makers making up for lost time after he skipped "The Wedding", perhaps. Oz is already married and his old flame is seeing somebody here, a doctor who is preposterously pretentious because the story needs to be fast-tracked. Later on, the plot-line will resort to Oz's wife taking ecstasy at a rowdy party to move things along. Elsewhere, some things work in the film, but most things do not. Characters need to be deaf; dumb and blind for much of the comedy to work: the louts whose beer and jet-skis Stifler ruins and Kara's parents when Jim tries to smuggle her back into her house, for instance.
We've lived with these characters for years through three other films, but there is no tremendous emotional crescendo to see them off - the tone leaping manically from heartfelt 'first love' reminiscing to frenzied comedy and back again at the reunion whose soundtrack cues eerily change at precisely the right moment to suit the conversation or exchange. Jim's epiphany, that he should 'find time' for sex in order to maintain his marriage, doesn't work for the simple reason it is a tactic he has already been trying up to this point anyway. It would be easy, for nostalgia's sake, to fall into liking "Reunion", and it has its moments, but there just isn't enough meat in this would-be pie to get suckered.
I was never of the opinion that there was anything especially nefarious about the "American Pie" films of 1999 to 2003; they were merely a goofy product of our system and its attitudes, not a source of them. Certainly, at the centre of the first film was a lesson about what happened when you allowed certain attitudes to consume you; when you charged into the great unknown ill-prepared because you felt you had to more-so because you wanted to. The other two were, broadly speaking, mere farces and didn't have an especially good idea of what to do with themselves.
This 2012 effort, "American Reunion", the second best in the series, is somewhat different. It depicts the East Grand Rapids High School gang as actual adults: some are married; some are fathers, most of them work but all are a long way from where they want to be. Shedding their virginities all those years ago on a prom night under a self-imposed air of coming of age, or rite of passage, did not make them millionaires or land them ideal life-situations.
The franchise has taken a gear-change in this respect, though it stops well short of opening with a Cormac McCarthy-esque monologue read in the style of Tommy Lee-Jones; trying instead to distinguish between what life for 16-18 year olds is like in 2012 compared to the dying embers of last century and the first few years of the new one. It has one of the crew, Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas), verbally outline how things have changed: girls are looser; young people are ruder and social networking has taken relations to a whole new level. What he neglects to point out is that if social media had existed fifteen years earlier, his generation would have used it in exactly the same fashion because the underlying issue is one of morality and not modernity.
As is form, the film revolves around the character of Jim (Jason Biggs), who, after the last film, is married to Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) and has an infant son. The film depicts two major factors in Jim's life combining over the timespan of one weekend: his frustration at possessing a sexless marriage and his high-school reunion, where the class of '99 and all the old faces are set to congregate back in the old Michigan town of East Great Falls. Backing up the central narrative are various stories involving the old crew: Oz (Chris Klein), whose first lines after missing the last film are "...and we're back!"; Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas); the aforementioned Kevin and the irreplaceable Stifler (Seann William Scott).
Arriving home to stay with his Dad, portrayed of course by Eugene Levy, temptation drops head-first into Jim's life in the form of Kara (Ali Cobrin), the girl next door whom he used to babysit but has now grown up into his own personal siren. We can tell he likes her because the film shoots her running over her lawn from Jim's gaze, a common technique to establish degrees of erotic wanting in a character. Our alarm bells continue to ring when we recall that the pornography Jim was looking at before the trip was college girl themed and that Kara fits this demographic. Admittedly, it is somewhat amusing to see the film transgress Jim's behaviour after, having been desperate for female contact the first time we met him, must now dead-bat female attention when it is she who possesses the societal urge to shed HER virginity.
Flimsier is the sub-plot to do with Oz who, for reasons of requiring a beefier runtime, gets his own story to do with bumping into his old girlfriend - the film-makers making up for lost time after he skipped "The Wedding", perhaps. Oz is already married and his old flame is seeing somebody here, a doctor who is preposterously pretentious because the story needs to be fast-tracked. Later on, the plot-line will resort to Oz's wife taking ecstasy at a rowdy party to move things along. Elsewhere, some things work in the film, but most things do not. Characters need to be deaf; dumb and blind for much of the comedy to work: the louts whose beer and jet-skis Stifler ruins and Kara's parents when Jim tries to smuggle her back into her house, for instance.
We've lived with these characters for years through three other films, but there is no tremendous emotional crescendo to see them off - the tone leaping manically from heartfelt 'first love' reminiscing to frenzied comedy and back again at the reunion whose soundtrack cues eerily change at precisely the right moment to suit the conversation or exchange. Jim's epiphany, that he should 'find time' for sex in order to maintain his marriage, doesn't work for the simple reason it is a tactic he has already been trying up to this point anyway. It would be easy, for nostalgia's sake, to fall into liking "Reunion", and it has its moments, but there just isn't enough meat in this would-be pie to get suckered.