August 10, 2001 | If the prospect of viewing American Pie 2 causes your spirits to surge with giddy anticipation, be forewarned: No one in this sequel has intimate relations with a baked good. On the other hand, just about everyone associated with the original American Pie is back for a second slice of hormonally inflamed fun and games.
J. B. Rogers (Say It Isn’t So) has replaced Paul Weitz as director, but Adam Herz has returned as screenwriter, thereby ensuring a fair amount of, uh, thematic consistency. (Or, to put it less charitably, a whole lot of recycling.) Much like its enormously popular 1999 predecessor, Pie 2 often plays like a ruder and cruder version of those notorious teen-sex comedies (Porky’s, Losin’ It, etc.) that were a cinematic staple during the Reagan Era. Also like the first Pie, however, the sequel cunningly tempers its full-bore raunchiness with a generous dose of date-movie sweetness and an overall sense of fair play. Some of the guys may be on the make all of the time, but none of the women are tricked, mistreated or even forced to serve as the, ahem, butt of mean-spirited jokes. The hottest of the hotties may be around only as eye candy, but they’re not the ones who have to make perfect fools of themselves. That task is assigned exclusively to the males in the cast.
Once again, the most diligently foolish of the lot is Jim (Jason Biggs), the guy who made a sexually underachieving spectacle of himself for an Internet audience in the previous American Pie. (He also was the one, you may recall, who discovered that nothin’ says lovin’ like somethin’ from the oven.) The sequel begins with Jim ending his freshman year of college with an even greater embarrassment in front of a mercifully smaller audience. After that, he’s more than ready to get away for a summer vacation.
So Jim sets off to a rented beach house with a few other American Pie alumni: Oz (Chris Klein), the affably dreamy-eyed jock; Stifler (Seann William Scott), the indefatigably rowdy and horny party animal; Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas), who’s finding it difficult to remain “just friends” with Vicky (Tara Reid), his former high-school sweetheart; and Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas), the droll hipster turned Tantric sex devotee, who can’t forget his glorious night of bliss with an alluring older woman (Jennifer Coolidge). Trouble is, that woman was, and still is, Stifler’s mother.
Even more so than most sequels, Pie 2 is designed primarily for audiences with vivid memories of its predecessor. If you never have seen the original, you may wonder why so many folks seated around you laugh so heartily each time anyone refers to the flute played so artfully by Michelle (Alyson Hannigan), the self-described “band geek.” But the uninitiated can easily figure out that Michelle relieved Jim of his virginity in the previous movie. Anxiously anticipating another encounter with Nadia (Shannon Elizabeth), the Swedish exchange student who was his Internet co-star, Jim seeks advice on seduction techniques from his first sex partner. Michelle is happy to oblige, in her inimitably perky fashion. And if you can’t predict where this leads, you really need to get out to the movies more often.
American Pie 2 takes a casual approach to propelling its various subplots, and seriously short-changes a few supporting players. Mena Suvari literally phones in most of her performance as Heather, Oz’s girlfriend, while Natasha Lyonne, who appeared only periodically as the blunt-spoken Jessica in the first American Pie, is even less of a presence here. Fortunately, other members of the ensemble cast — including Eugene Levy, back again as Jim’s over-empathetic father – have more to do, and they do it well. As a result, the movie is never less than amusing, and frequently escalates to the level of uproarious hilarity.
The funniest bits involve various forms of sexual humiliation, a gleefully cruel type of humor that can generate as much nervous squirming as helpless laughter. (That is, if you’re a male; if you’re female, you’ll probably just laugh, heartlessly, and shame on you.) One scene calls for Jim to suffer a kind of performance anxiety at Michelle’s band camp. Later, he does something with a tube of glue and a pornographic videotape that, trust me, if you’re a guy, you never – repeat, never! – want to do with a tube of glue and a pornographic videotape.
The highlight of the movie is a scene in which Stifler seeks to fulfill a popular male fantasy by watching two presumed lesbians in a close encounter. But the women insist that, before he can watch them, they should get to watch while Stifler and Jim – or, worse, Finch – get it on. (Stifler’s expression says it all: The horror! The horror!) Rarely, if ever, has any comedy force-fed just dessert to a homophobic lunkhead with such deliciously nasty exuberance.
