"Where Movie Critics Get A Taste Of Their Own Medicine"
Subscribe To Weekly Newsletter!

AMERICAN WEDDING
by Peter Sobczynski

August 1, 2003

(out of 4 stars)

FILM CREDITS: Written by Adam Herz. Directed by Jesse Dylan. Starring Jason Biggs, Alyson Hannigan, January Jones, Seann William Scott and Eugene Levy. Rated R

It took them three attempts but the makers of "American Wedding" -the second (and reportedly last) sequel to the freakishly popular comedy "American Pie"-have finally figured out how to make one of their more excruciating running jokes pay off. In each film, there has always been a sequence in which Stifler (Seann William Scott), the party-hearty blowhard, winds up ingesting some kind of foul bodily excretion. In the first two attempts, the joke didn’t work because he was blissfully unaware of what was going into his mouth and his sheer obliviousness (until it was too late) wound up working against the material and the results were simply unpleasant. This time around, returning screenwriter Adam Herz has figured out that if he could devise a circumstance in which the dope fully knows what is going into his mouth and make it the only possible way to get out of situation, it would be much funnier than he just started munching away unawares. I’m not saying that the scene is a piece of comic genius (without getting into specifics, it is a blatant knockoff of one of the more celebrated moments in the career of John Waters) but it does show a little bit of creative development.

While "American Wedding" is slightly better than "American Pie 2" (mostly because a lot of the dead wood from that installment has been stripped away-Chris Klein and all of the girls but Alyson Hannigan are MIA this time), it is still nothing more than an attempt to squeeze a few more dollars out of the success of the freakishly popular 1999 original. For starters, the plot-in which sexual dysfunctionist Jim (Jason Biggs) and his girlfriend, band-camp vixen Michelle (Hannigan) get engaged and encounter all sorts of elaborate misadventures on their way to the altar-seems like a weird framework for a gross-out comedy: women, by and large, don’t find large-scale knockabout comedy funny (you’ll never see a woman quoting "Caddyshack" in public, for example) and guys won’t have any interest in wedding shenanigans that come mighty close to chick-flick material. (They might be intrigued by the idea of a bachelor party but even that sequence seems oddly sedate and uninspired.) The elaborate scenes of scatalogically-based public embarrassment come off as incredibly forced and unlikely (consider the chain of events that leads to the pastry defilement this time around) and the scenes of "sweetness" (a hallmark of the series so that the makers and the viewers can feel better about the scenes that would have inspired a police raid of the theater 30 years ago) are more cynically conceived and deployed than ever-they come off like the scenes of "socially redeeming material" that porn directors used to stick in their films to get around the censors.

Aside from the initially amusing conceit of the vulgarian Stifler trying to pose as a refined gentleman to score with the bride’s younger sister (January Jones), "American Wedding" is just another lackluster sequel that will have a big opening weekend and then be quickly forgotten. The only real laughs in the film come from the always reliable Eugene Levy, returning as Jim’s hilariously unflappable dad, and the equally invaluable Fred Willard as the father of the bride: the material that they have been given isn’t much, frankly, but these two comic greats have enough skill and comic timing between them to deliver the gags with far more wit and panache than they deserve.

-- PETER SOBCZYNSKI

Copyright © 2003 Peter Sobczynski
All rights reserved.
Used with permission
Peter's Archives

While the views expressed by Peter Sobczynski do not necessarily reflect the views of Criticdoctor.com, the Critic Doctor will occasionally examine Mr. Sobczynski's film reviews to bring forth an honest examination of those views expressed.