Weekend Muvie Revue

American Reunion

Let me start today by asking a question.  What is comedy?  Now let’s ignore that question ‘cuz it’s stupid and talk about American Reunion.

The great thing about life is that all good things must come to an end, but then they can totally start again much later.  They probably won’t be good anymore but they’ll be all there and stuff and that’s nice.  Now I’m not here to judge the original American Pie Trilogy.  I’ll leave that debate to the historians.  The only question here is whether or not this movie holds its own, on its own.  And It does not.  Honestly, it doesn’t even hold its own as a sequel.  This isn’t a snobby rating.  I don’t walk into American Pie expecting Space Odyssey.

I understand very clearly what the goal of this movie is.  And for the first 45 minutes or so I was pretty satisfied.  Surprised, even.  What could have been a terrible, watered-down ripoff kept it together and 90% of it is that you can tell the people involved cared about this movie.  They honestly enjoy these characters and wanted to tell more stories with them.  When a joke didn’t land or Alyson Hannigan said anything it didn’t bother me the way it might have because there was still a sense of fun to it.  I’ve always said that the remedy to 90% of any movie’s problems would have been to give more of a shit.  This movie is a perfect example of that.  Loving these characters saved this movie from being the next From Justin to Kelly.  But they did ruin it.  This movie was 5 minutes away from ending for about an hour and it just. kept. getting. worse.

Caring about what you’re doing will save you from a lot but in the end if you have no clue what you’re doing you can only make up for so much.  At a point, loving it comes back around and bites you in the ass because you love all the characters so much you just have to give them all their own story lines and someone who cared less would have the sense to say ‘do we really need to know what happened to the MILF guys?’  In any sequel there’s a certain amount of referencing you need to because the whole reason people are here is that they loved the first one.  And this movie is exactly how you don’t do it.  All you need are strategically placed winks.  Reunion literally just told all of its A stories and then spent 45 minutes at the end reminding you that Shurman exists.

I went into this movie with no expectations – good or bad – because I’m an amazing critic, but once it started off well I wanted so bad for it to keep that momentum.  It just didn’t.  You might be readying your ‘dude, it’s just a goofy comedy’ defense.  Please don’t.  First off, that’s not a good reason to be shitty.  Second, no matter how silly a movie is supposed to be it needs to make a certain amount of sense.  In the debate between happy vs sad endings, a lot of people miss the point.  A movie doesn’t need to have either one, it just needs to make sense.  American Pie movies should definitely have a happy ending, but they still needs to do the work to get there.  If a character is a deadbeat loser who can’t grow up and in the end he quits his job and tells his boss to fuck himself you haven’t created a happy ending no matter how much sweet 90’s music you jam behind it because now we’re all wondering how he’s going to eat.  By all means, end happy.  But show us how a character grows or changes to earn that happy ending.

And that’s American Reunion’s story.  It’s a movie that loves itself.  Then it keeps loving itself over and over until it gets a painful rash.  At some point you need to stop loving yourself and start fixing your shit.  So if you love the first three, god bless you.  But those three totally still exist.  Go watch them.  I guarantee this won’t give you anything they didn’t.  But if you ignore me and do go, there’s just enough here to keep it tolerable.  You’ll laugh some and be bored a little more.  It’ll be the worst movie you don’t hate all year. – DT

Verdict:

**(out of ****)

 

Am I right or am I right?  Email all opinions, in the form of a yes or no answer, to [email protected] and explain yourself before you cause pain to yourself.  Or, follow me on Twitter @Dan_Tompkins.  You can shout at me there and as a bonus, I will amuse you.