Final Thoughts and Rating: I'm giving American Pie 0/10 st...I'm just kidding, I actually have some things to say about American Pie and I don't actually hate it. I just thought it'd be funny to give a bad rating as my review. American Pie is a pretty stupid movie though.
I remember when this movie came out. I was twelve years old and was starting grade 7 at a new school two months later. It being the summer of 1999, there was no internet. At least not the way we have it now. So I had no idea how big this movie was that summer. I just saw commercials for it on TV and knew that I wasn't allowed to watch it. Also, I wasn't in touch with any of my friends from school so I had no clue. It wasn't until I went back to school in the fall that I heard kids talking about it. They were thrilled with the raunchiness of the humour, because they were all 11 and 12 year olds and at that age dick jokes are hugely hilarious. And because American Pie is basically one big dick joke, kids my age loved it even though we weren't supposed to be able to see it. But the parents of my classmates weren't always the most vigilant when it came to what their kids watched it seemed like, because my classmates saw it anyway.
In the intervening 21 years since the movie came out and I was just a 12 year old kid starting middle school, I continued to not see American Pie or it's three direct sequels and four spin-off sequels (the American Pie Presents series). I saw other raunchy comedies like Superbad and Napoleon Dynamite, but the American Pie franchise just didn't grab my attention. Even the sequels, which came out throughout the 2000s, didn't get as much attention as the original 1999 movie did. Four of the sequels were direct-to-video, but even the three theatrical sequels got less and less attention from the media as the 2000s went on as other movies garnered more attention such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy and reboots like Casino Royale (2005) and Star Trek (2009). By the time the fourth film in the main series, American Reunion came out in 2012, the world had moved on from this franchise. At least my generation did, since we were the original fans for it and we were adults now and realized that dick jokes weren't enough to sustain a movie series. Especially not the same tired dick jokes that were thirteen years old by that point.
Did I like anything about this movie? Of course. I really enjoyed Oz and Heather's storyline. Maybe that's because I really like Chris Klein as an actor. He was great as Orlin Dwyer, a.k.a. Cicada in season 5 of The Flash, and I really enjoyed that character because Klein is a great actor. And while American Pie was only his second acting job, Klein brings a maturity to the character of Oz that the other characters lack. And Mena Suvari is great as Heather. I also like Jason Biggs, Eddie Kaye Thomas, Tara Reid, and Alyson Hannigan as actors too. The others are okay too, but the one I really cannot stand at all is Stifler, played by Sean William Scott.
I have never liked Sean William Scott's work. He played Bo Duke in the 2005 remake of The Dukes of Hazzard and he was super obnoxious in that movie. In fact he's super obnoxious in pretty much every movie he seems to be in, like Road Trip and Dude, Where's My Car?. It's characters like that that I can't stand. Normally I'd say that it isn't actually the fault of the actors, but in this case it kinda is, because the actor is the one who chooses the roles he or she plays, so if he or she goes out of their way to play obnoxious characters then it's hard for me to like that actor's work.
Shannon Elizabeth, who plays Nadia in the movie, was a huge actress around the time this movie came out. She was in Scary Movie and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and played Brooke, the mother of Kelso's kid on That '70s Show for two seasons between 2003 and 2005. Like I said, she was everywhere back then.
There isn't actually that much comedy in this movie. Which helps a little bit because I can connect to some of the characters in some way. What there is though I didn't find to be all that funny. I realize that humour is subjective so I'm not going to knock points off because of the comedy that I didn't find funny. The thing is though, if I'd seen this movie as a teenager or in my early twenties, I probably would've thought that the humour in it was hilarious. Funny how that happens isn't it?
Final Thoughts and Rating (for real this time): Overall, American Pie isn't a great movie. There are good things about it, like some of the characters and the music in the movie, but as a whole it doesn't work for me as an almost 34 year old as it would've if I were in my late teens or early twenties. Which is by no means the fault of the movie. It was just meant to be an audience who is younger than I am. Which is perfectly okay. I'm giving American Pie 4/10 stars for having some good moments and some good characters, as well as a mostly decent cast.
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