American Wedding

American Wedding

See also:
American Pie (Uncle Cliff)
American Pie 2 (Uncle Cliff)
American Pie: Band Camp (Thomas J.)
American Pie: Band Camp (Uncle Cliff)

Welcome to the Stifler show.

Ditching a few characters – including the amazingly enigmatic ChrisKleinbot3000 – to make some more room for Stifler’s antics sounds like a fine plan on paper for the third film in the Pie series, but in actuality it turns out that the Stifmeister is one of those hilarious and cool fan-favourite characters that bring much needed colour to proceedings in a second-tier role, but whose special sheen seems to dissipate somewhat when given a larger one. Think Bobba Fett. As soon as Lucas caught on to the geek-fan-love for this peripheral character he went and digitally inserted him everywhere in the Special Editions and wrote a whole back-story for him in the prequel trilogy, automatically rendering him totally lame. Everyone loves Darth Maul, but would he still be as cool if he was in every scene of the entire boring Phantom Menace? My point is that the more you see of a character like Stifler the less amusing he becomes.

Perhaps in spite of that Sean William Scott amps his Stifler up to 11 and makes him so incredibly over-the-top it’s totally absorbing. It’s almost like he’s acting out what Jim Carrey’s take on Stifler might be, and in doing so succeeds in making him one of the most entertainingly obnoxious cinematic creations of all time. Did he even have a script, or a licence to just go fucking nuts? Funny thing is: while Stifler gets badly over-exposed here and isn’t anywhere near as funny as the other Pie flicks, he is still the only good thing going. They lean so heavily on that character because there really isn’t anything else amusing about American Wedding.

The crux of the first two films was that they nicely toed-the-line between screwball sex comedy and slightly saccharine reflections on teen life lessons, but this third endeavour satisfies on neither front. Any serious life-lessons or reflections on growing up are jettisoned as Wedding just shoots for easy laughs again and again, forgetting that the reason the first two films were so hilarious was that most people could relate with Jim’s awkward teen sexual exploits in one way or another. Here the strained sex set-ups are just downright fucking goofy, even lamer on the special edition which includes what looks like out-takes into the actual film as the actors slip in and out of character just mucking around – it’s strangely avant-garde stuff. Even Eugene Levy, the glue of the first two films, appears to have outstayed his welcome.

It is to Stifler we then turn for a guaranteed chuckle or two, especially amusing when he and the usually refined Finch take on the characteristics of the other to try and impress a chick. So obviously does the reliance on Stifler get to saturation point that the filmmakers should have just gone all the way and made a Stifler spin-off film, ditching all the cast and just setting him loose on Europe or something. Hell, I’d even pay to see something called Stifler in Space. It couldn’t be any worse than this.