It ought to be no fun watching characters you came to know as randy, unruly high school students turn into grown-ups with jobs, families and crappy sex lives. That?s what happens to real-life people; why subject fictional characters to it? But somehow American Reunion — the third movie sequel to Paul and Chris Weitz?s hall-of-fame teen sex comedy 1999 American Pie — makes the harsh reality jolt almost painless.
The picture is devilishly entertaining, not least because it?s laced with just the sort of dumb raunchy jokes you hate yourself for laughing at. But it also preserves, to a degree, the elemental sweetness that made the original (though not the two subsequent sequels) so distinctive: In the first movie, embarrassment and awkwardness over sex results not just in a mess in the kitchen, but in painful and unbridgeable rifts between people. In American Reunion, that awkwardness may have lessened somewhat, but it hasn?t completely gone away. You can think you?re trading old problems for new ones, only to find that the old ones are perennial ? they just find different ways to flourish in your life.
That?s a discomforting idea in the midst of a picture that trades mostly in gags about tube socks? being used for illicit personal business, nostalgia for the mind-blowing oral sex of yore (meaning high school) and men who, as they near middle age with all its attendant spare tires and love handles, can?t help looking hungrily at the nubile teenage babes they used to be able to attract. Directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg (the masterminds behind the always-silly but also surprisingly progressive Harold and Kumar franchise) are perhaps more comfortable dealing with ridiculous sex jokes than they are with raw human feeling. Still, American Reunion chugs along with brash confidence, unembarrassed…
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