Neil Young's Film Lounge

Neil Young’s Film Lounge – American Pie 2

American Pie 2

6/10

USA 2001 : J B Rogers : 105 mins

Critics on both sides of the Atlantic lined up to give American Pie 2 a good kicking, and it’s easy to see why. They seldom pay to see movies, especially low-brow comedies like AP2 – instead they go to press screenings in which a dozen or so of their colleagues are dotted around the auditorium: not a conducive atmosphere for belly laughs. Another factor counting against films made for a 15-24 target audience is that very few critics fall into this age group. Sad to say, most professional film reviewers are either lazy, snobbish or both – for them, it’s the easiest thing in the world to take one look at American Pie 2 and turn up their noses in disgust (“a sequel?! yech!”) before moving on to the next arthouse delight.

I’ve seen it given ‘no stars’ out of five in one influential tabloid, and routinely dismissed as one of the worst films of the year. In my view it’s a touch above average – not a great comedy by any means, but nowhere near the travesty I’d been led to expect. Then again, I paid to see it, with a (mostly) youthful audience in a small town in a remote corner of rural England, and half the lines were drowned out because the audience was laughing so much. Perhaps they’re starved for entertainment in Woodhall Spa on October Thursday nights. And perhaps I was just going along with the herd – but I left the cinema in a much better mood than after Amelie, The Man Who Wasn’t There, The Circle and Ghost World, all of which I appreciate are, by any objective standard, ‘better’ films than American Pie 2. I just didn’t enjoy any of them as much.

Anyway, this is supposed to be a review, so I should give some indication of the plot. Except there isn’t one. Five university first-years spend a week of their vacation at a fancy lakeside summerhouse. They moan about their love-lives, plan a big party, and then the party happens. That’s about it – the grab-bag script strings together a lot of farce and slapstick, and about half the jokes fall pretty flat. But the big set-pieces are orchestrated passably well, and there’s a breezy crudeness about the film that keeps it going through the odd dull patch.

The single best reason for seeing American Pie 2, however, is Seann William Scott, clown prince of American cinema and, for me, the funniest performer in films today. The first American Pie (which I haven’t seen) was his screen debut, and since then he’s been the best thing in Final Destination and Dude Where’s My Car? (both of these senselessly rubbished by the vast majority of critics, but whose merit was recognised by cinema and video audiences), the so-so Road Trip and the duff Evolution.

In AP2 he somehow manages to keep his the foul-mouthed, knuckle-brained, self-obsessed sex-mad uber-jock Stifler just the right side of caricature. He’s got a relentless, don’t-give-a-fuck energy that makes the most out of every gesture, every line, every second of screen time – every frame, perhaps. Comics are always drastically underrated as actors, but think about Jerry Lewis in King of Comedy, John Goodman in Barton Fink, or Groucho Marx in just about anything: compared to the stiffs that populate the 1930s Marx Brothers quickies, Groucho seems alive, modern, sharp. That kind of great comic acting is still great acting, and Seann William Scott is, by any standards, an outstanding comic actor.

20th October, 2001
(seen Oct-18-01, Kinema in the Woods, Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire)

by Neil Young

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