WhatzUp

American Pie 2
by Derek Neff

American Pie 2 is as defiantly brain-dead, superficial, and raunchy as the first American Pie, but with perhaps even funnier scenes. The entire cast from the original film has returned for this slightly-better-than-so-so sequel to a slightly-better-than-so-so movie, but this time Jim, Finch, Oz and the rest are now college boys on the make, instead of high schoolers trying to lose their respective virginities on high school prom night. They have all pooled their money together to rent a beach house for the summer in the naļve hope that all the partying will somehow help them solve all their life problems. (Not since the early 1980s, during the heyday of the co-ed sex comedy, has the proposition that unlimited beer and one-night stands can somehow lead to a zenlike state of enlightenment been so sincerely delivered.)

There is plenty of sex-talk in American Pie 2, and lots of sexual situations, but all of the scenes end disastrously: they seemed to be staged with the sole intent of humiliating our main characters. Jim (Jason Biggs) accidentally uses Super-Glue on a certain part of his anatomy; the endlessly offensive Stifler (Sean William Scott, making up for his lack of acting talent by delivering all his lines with an enthusiastic pinch of malice) leans back during an erotic moment and opens his mouth to receive what he thinks is champagne, only to get something entirely different poured on him; Oz (Chris Klein) repeatedly fails at his attempts to have phone sex with his long-distant girlfriend (Mena Suvari). On so on, and so on. The scenes are not that clever, and not that novel, but they’re somehow pretty funny, at least some of the time.

Surely no one watching American Pie 2 expects to see high art, so to judge it as anything but a simple sex comedy would be unfair. By those low-brow standards, American Pie 2 delivers.