Exactly twelve years have passed since their graduation, but what have the former teenagers of East Great Falls been up to in all this time? Oz, after leaving Heather and moving to sunny California, has become a famous sports commentator with a blonde girlfriend with a perfect body and a less developed mind.
Kevin, happily married to a career woman, has chosen to work at home and become an avid supporter of soap operas, while the enigmatic Finch has earned a reputation as an adventurer thanks to a trip around the world that seems to have no end.
To these more or less interesting existences, Jim and his Michelle respond with a child and a slightly bored and sexually distracted married life. For all of them, therefore, it seems that the years of high school and hormonal storms are only a vague memory of the past.
Yet, when they find themselves together again for the inevitable class reunion, not only do they discover that Stifler the troublemaker does not seem to have freed himself in the slightest from his adolescent passions, but they understand that the desire to still be together can resist the passing of time and the inevitable changes in life.
When the clumsy Jim Levenstein and his friends made their first appearance on the big screen in 1999, they certainly didn't have the ambition to create a real saga based on demented humor.
The fact remains, however, that the first American Pie directed by the Weitz brothers inaugurated a new era in which teenagers were once again the protagonists, able to freely express the obsessions and incompetence of their first sexual approaches, all always conveyed through the rightly extreme language of farce.
An experiment already attempted in the eighties with Porky's (and its sequels), but which, in this case, using more "extreme" comic situations and a current context, managed to create unprecedented empathy.
Because, going beyond the artistic value of the product, Jim, Oz, Finch, Kevin and Stifler managed to entertain and move more than one generation, staging the ironic reflection of the joys and many "pains" of an age conditioned almost exclusively by hormones.
Nine years after the last chapter American Pie: The Wedding, however, it is inevitable to witness a change of direction, even if not definitive and revolutionary.
Thus, if the presence behind the camera of the duo Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg has continued to guarantee an infinite series of troubles and unforeseen events with a high rate of nudity and transparency (of which Jason Biggs is continuously victim and protagonist), the evident maturity of the interpreters has imposed a series of reflections on the future and on personal identity that are practically inevitable.
For this reason, American Reunion seems to live through two different but strangely complementary souls that, while imposing a sometimes discontinuous rhythm on the film, manage to build a complete and harmonious story together.
On the one hand, especially thanks to Stifler's ever-excessive personality, the youthful and jovial spirit of the beginning is kept alive, while on the other, Jim's need for reliability and the more solid structure of all the female characters characterize this new adventure with a subtle melancholy.
The fact is that the kids have grown up and, when confronted with the memory of their adolescence, they realize it without too much drama. Indeed, between colossal binges, night parties on the beach, new teenagers who are all too available, unbridled sex in the middle of a rugby field and parents prey to loneliness or marijuana lovers, they laugh at themselves in search of a formula to become adults without losing sight of the inexperienced kids of the past.
The secret is, needless to say, friendship, the only feeling capable of surviving time and failures. A principle perhaps too simple and obvious, but particularly effective, because there can be no future without a group of adventure companions with whom to continue partying, even if only for a weekend.
The fourth "official" chapter of the extremely popular comic saga created by Adam Herz, the seventh (ugh) if you also consider the "spin-offs" released directly for home video , reunites for the first time since "American Pie 2", the cast of the original film from 1999. A reason that should be enough, at least in theory, to bring back to the theaters the many fans of the dirty high schoolers who had entertained the public over a decade ago. Does it work?
The operation is not far from the one attempted last year by "Scream 4": taking up a brand considered dead and trying to graft elements of novelty. After all, for better or for worse, "American Pie" (along with the films of the Farelly Bros.) towards the end of the 90s, seminally defined scatological-demented cinema, just as Wes Craven & Kevin Williamson did with horror.
The formula of the various "American Pies" is well-established and well-known: scatological and vulgar gags, almost always of a sexual nature, which hide, not even in a too veiled way, a sentimentalism and an underlying moralism that are decidedly reassuring, and sometimes worrying in their conservatism.
This new chapter in the adventures of the now almost forty-year-old Jim, Michelle, Stifler, Oz & Co., is entrusted to the hands of genre experts Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, authors of the series of zany films "Harold & Kumar", very popular in the USA, which apparently try the new card of nostalgia.
Compared to other films of the franchise, especially the straight to DVD ones, the vulgarity (non-verbal, always insisted) is more contained, and the emphasis is on the presumed "melancholic" effect that the reunion of these jovial young men should produce.
But don't expect "The Big Chill" of the 2000s. The packaging is even sloppier than in the past, the actors have aged badly (only Sean William Scott seems convinced), and the two directors seem to ignore that thirteen years have passed since the first film, and that a lot of water has passed under the bridge: phalluses in the wind and a few breasts no longer scandalize anyone in the era of "The Hangover", and the timid vulgarities and obvious humiliations to which the protagonists are subjected are anachronistic and out of time to trigger a few liberating laughs.
The only potentially winning idea, that of Jim's father (the always nice Eugene Levy) who would like to go back to live after the disappearance of his wife, is abandoned on the street after a few hints.
It remains a static and strained film, which will perhaps please fans of the first one with its uselessly self-referential attitude (in the final party all the faces of the first episode appear, but if you don't know it by heart it will be difficult to appreciate or smile), but it will bore everyone else.
If the vulgarity is partially held back, the same cannot be said of the bigoted and conservative ideological undercurrent in a film that also wants to be a eulogy of fun and lack of morals. Despite the countless temptations, there is not a single married couple who cheats on each other in almost two hours of film. In the end the return to order, between marriage and baby is mandatory, and sex with a handsome eighteen-year-old is not even taken into consideration.
In short, if in '99 the Weitz brothers' film had the excuse of "sociological" reflection, and staged (according to some) youth sexuality with an "unprecedented" approach, now there are no more justifications. And there is no longer any reason to exist for this period regurgitation, which only causes irritation and tedium.
