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Acting
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Directing
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Story
Starring: Jason Biggs, Seann William Scott, Shannon Elizabeth
Director: J.B. Rogers
Running Time: 105 mins
American Pie 2 is an American film and the sequel to American Pie. A year after the end of high school, the gang from the first film reunite and get themselves into even more awkward teenage situations.
Well, this isn’t one of those sequels that is just horrifically worse than the original, in fact this does very well with keeping on a par with the first film, as it’s basically THE SAME FILM. The first one wasn’t very funny, and this is just a complete replication of that over and over again, with about two good jokes, tedious and annoying characters and the repetition of the big hits of the previous film that mean it’s no worse than before, but it has to lose credit for a serious lack of originality.
Starting with the comedy, this franchise as a whole is one of those that seem to be giving off the appearance of just silly juvenile fun, but is still really rubbish even when you watch it just for that. Every single joke here is completely predictable, especially if you’ve seen the first film, and pretty much none of them will make you laugh – some will deliberately make you cringe, which is a sort of double-edged sword of success, but most will just completely miss the mark.
The characters are no better here than in the first film. At the end of high school, maybe their idiocy is excusable, but a year on into university, they haven’t developed at all, signalling how cartoonishly stupid they are, and the fact that they genuinely do just do the exact same things again in this film is incredibly boring and, if you found the first film irritating, horrifically annoying.
Basically, there’s nothing much to say about this film apart from the fact that it’s just lazy. It’s a carbon copy of the original where it seems like no work has gone into coming up with fresh new ideas, neither from the writers nor the actors, and whilst that does mean this isn’t comparable worse than the first film, its painful lack of originality leads me to drop this to a 4.9.