Movie success often breeds complacency, big bucks often foster laziness and “American Wedding” proves both. It’s one more slice of raunchy comedy from the “American Pie” franchise, this time bringing back most of the male members of the “Pie” gang for a high-priced wedding–between clumsy Jim Levenstein (Jason Biggs) and ever-ready band camper Michelle Flaherty (Alyson Hannigan)–that manages to be both gross and sentimental, often at the same time. What the movie does miss, especially by comparison with the first “Pie” are the laughs. By now, the pie is stale and the whole thing is one big fat geek wedding fiasco.
This is a series that, at its very best (1999’s funny, lively original), suggests a sub-Farrelly Brothers ripoff of “American Graffiti” and “The Graduate” and, at its worst, resembles ’60s soft-core porno without the sex scenes. “American Pie 2” seemed to have hit that nadir, with its staging of a demented summer orgy whose comic highlight came when clumsy Jim mistook Krazy Glue for a sexual lubricant. But as history, cable news and “American Wedding” teach us, things can always get worse.
Now, back to the screen, thanks largely to the big box-office receipts of “American Pie” and “Pie 2” movies, come those sex-crazed East Green Falls High chums: Jim Levenstein, Steve “The Stifmeister” Stifler (Seann William Scott), Paul Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) and Kevin Myers (Thomas Ian Nicholas). They are four upper-middle class doofus-hellraisers who have survived high school, college, and innumerable gags about condoms, Internet sex, self- abuse and misfiring toilets. Now, they are beginning to settle down and face the real-life problems they and the filmmakers have been long avoiding: marriage, gay bar, sex-crazed grandmas, bachelor parties and misfiring toilets.
Missing, apparently forever, are the gang’s ex-friends and ex-girlfriends played by Chris Klein, Mena Suvari and Natasha Lyonne–some of whom may have gotten too big (or too skittish) to sign on again.
Despite these depleted ranks, “American Wedding” gets down to business fast. Writer Adam Herz knows what he thinks his audience wants and seems eager to give it to us. At a fancy restaurant, Jim fervently tries to propose to Michelle, and she mistakenly but obligingly slides under the table to show her appreciation, only to be almost immediately discovered by the entire restaurant, including Jim’s parents, super-doofus Mr. Levenstein (Eugene Levy) and perky Mrs. Levenstein (Molly Cheek). Nobody seems too rattled except accident-prone Jim, a sensitive type embarrassed by almost everything.
Soon the wedding prep is under way. First on the schedule: a pre-wedding party in which Jim and his boorish wannabe swinger-pal Stifler are somehow discovered in flagrante delictio with two dogs belonging to Michelle’s straight-laced dad (Fred Willard). Then, when Michelle’s Gwyneth Paltrow-clone (or “Gwynethian”) sister Cadence (January Jones) shows up, she triggers a film-long rivalry between Finch and Stifler; Stifler decides to clean up his act for Cadence and Finch, frustrated, masquerades as “The Finchmeister.” Stifler’s clean-up act is mildly amusing–he comes off for most of the movie as a combination of Eddie Haskell, Pat Sajak and Stifler’s idol, porn star Ron Jeremy. But it also deprives the movie of its major source of comedy: Stifmeister’s obnoxious hedonism.
To give the filmmakers credit, they do seem to be trying here to extend the story logically and not just serve up the same old baloney–which, however, they wind up doing anyway. So the guys and girls show off their college education; unaware of current national prejudices, everybody keeps quoting French philosophers, including Voltaire and Descartes. The camerados also engage in gay bar disco battles, romp at a bachelor party complete with dominatrixes and a surprise appearance by the Flaherty family, and cause or suffer various other debacles involving bashed wedding cakes, wilted flowers and that sex-crazed grandma.
At the wedding itself, a pricey affair at a pricey resort, we finally get the two signature speeches that sum up the movie’s thrust. Michelle, dancing with Jim, dreamily says, “How did a perv like you get to be such a great guy?” Jim dreamily replies, “How did a nympho like you get to be such a great girl?” How did hackwork like this get to be such an expensive movie? Only the Pie-meisters know for sure.
Buried under all this is a partly sharp and funny look at middle-class Jewish and gentile rites of passage. But Herz has only a few main sources of humor: sexual fiascoes, messes, toilet catastrophes, the Stifmeister bomp-bomping away and the idiotic fatherly lectures delivered, with an admirably straight face, by Levy. Here, only Levy is working at a prime level, but he doesn’t have the material to sustain him. Neither does Levy’s partner in the Chris Guest stock company, Fred Willard–who is 10 times funnier making up his own lines in movies like “Best in Show” than saying Herz’s lines here, while trying to react to the dog orgies.
I laughed at “American Pie,” but the second movie left me feeling like a patsy. This third one seems just as thin, though you can tell the moviemakers, including director Jesse Dylan, are trying to slip in messages and homilies along with Voltaire allusions; the gay bar scene may even be a witless stab at political correctness. But was it really over half a century ago that director Vincente Minnelli, writers Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett and stars Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor made “Father of the Bride,” a funny, touching and even realistic wedding comedy? “American Wedding” isn’t even as good as the inferior 1991 remake of “Father” with Steve Martin and Diane Keaton.
The crass sentimentality of “American Wedding” increasingly fits Norman Mailer’s definition: “the emotional promiscuity of the basically unemotional.” The jokes are unemotional, uncouth and mostly unfunny as well. Those wedding bells should be breaking up that old gang before they strike again, perhaps with “American Pregnancy,” “American Perv” or “American Nympho.”
`American Wedding’
(star)1/2
Directed by Jesse Dylan; written by Adam Herz; photographed by Lloyd Ahern; edited by Stuart Pappe; production designed by Clayton Hartley; music by Christopher Beck; executive producers Paul Weitz, Chris Weitz, Louis G. Friedman; produced by Warren Zide, Craig Perry, Chris Moore, Herz, Chris Bender. A Universal Pictures release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:36. MPAA rating: R (for sexual content, language and crude humor).
Jim Levenstein …………. Jason Biggs
Steve Stifler ………….. Seann William Scott
Michelle Flaherty ………. Alyson Hannigan
Paul Finch …………….. Eddie Kaye Thomas
Kevin Myers ……………. Thomas Ian Nicholas
Cadence Flaherty ……….. January Jones
Jim’s Dad ……………… Eugene Levy
Harold Flaherty ………… Fred Willard
Stifler’s Mom ………….. Jennifer Coolidge
