K-SCORE: 9
Director: Paul Weitz, Chris Weitz
Writer: Adam Herz
Starring: Jason Biggs, Eugene Levy, Seann William Scott, Chris Klein, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Eddie Kaye Thomas, Tara Reid, Mena Suvari, Natasha Lyonne, Alyson Hannigan
Spoiler Level: What can you spoil in American Pie? The pie scene? None really.
“Knowing the future of these careers and this franchise, watching the film was kind of like watching a positive happy-go-lucky safety training video for those working at Chernobyl circa 1985.”
Well, I had to watch it in thirty minute chunks because I truly couldn’t stomach any more of it in a single sitting. It’s not that American Pie’s comedy is crass, its plot is trite, and its characters despicable people (although all of that is true), it’s that the film actually spends a huge amount of time with these characters NOT pranking each other, making jokes, or walking into awkward situations that would traumatize me irreparably, and instead suffers through unspeakable discussions on young relationships and really connecting emotionally with your high school friends and opposite sex sex partners.
The film is packed with lines like, “Maybe I’m just genetically incapable of talking to girls,” and “I want our first time to be perfect,” and “With you, I’m not looking for a way to score. I feel like I’ve already won.” These pieces of inauthentic, cheesy, expositional, cringe-inducing dialogue are delivered so poorly by every actor who reads them that I’m confident I could have rounded up kids at Hawken School and done a better job with this shit script. There are two actors worse than Tara Reid! Knowing the future of these careers and this franchise, watching the film was kind of like watching a positive happy-go-lucky safety training video for those working at Chernobyl circa 1985.
Speaking of which, Chris Klein acts like Paul Walker only if radiation had damaged Walker’s brain. The questions his performance begs are not my normal scathing, “Do you have any understanding of the circumstances or are you just trying to remember your lines?” or “Have you ever talked to a person before?” No. With him I want to shout, “Are you alive?!”
The filmmakers for American Pie could have worked out a way for it to be merely stupid and yet refused, shoving it instead into a pit of awfulness from which there is no escape and that leaves no survivors. I wish I could write it off as more sophomoric idiocy, but its success back in 1999 makes me think American Pie is a cornerstone in the engineered downfall of American cinema.