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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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