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American Pie 2, at nearly 20 minutes longer (in the unrated cut) feels overstuffed, less comedically sustained and struggles to find interesting things for the characters to do. Thus, Heather gets shipped off to overseas summer study and the only meaningful plot point that she and Oz are given is to be repeatedly thwarted in attempts to have phone sex. (There are few things as awkward and cringe worthy as Mena Suvari and Chris Klein engaging in long-distance dirty talk. Except perhaps the moments that aren’t supposed to be awkward - i.e. when they are making each other “hot.”)

When it opened, the second serving of Pie was only the third R-rated film ever to open at more than $40 million (it surpassed the previous summer’s Scary Movie and trailed behind Hannibal, released earlier in 2001.) As befitting a sequel that strives for bigger, better, and cruder, American Pie 2 ups the antes on both the humiliations of protagonist Jim Levenstein (Jason Biggs) as well as the series’ comic foil, Steve Stifler. For Jim, being caught masturbating in his room by his parents is one-upped in the sequel into being caught attempting sex with a co-ed on the last day of the freshman year by both his parents, and her parents. (These opening sequence embarrassments are as much a part of the series’ identity as the Scream franchise’s pre-title murders.) Similarly, attempting self-gratification via baked goods the first time around is transformed into a thwarted attempt at whacking off that results in one hand crazy glued to a porno videocassette and the other hand crazy glued to his manhood. Biggs may have limited range, but Jim fits him like a, um, glove, and his willingness to go bare-assed on multiple occasions is admirable.

Stifler, who as portrayed by Seann William Scott is both the series’ comic stealth bomb and its most excruciating character (it becomes harder and harder to separate the line between the two by American Wedding) suffers a pair of ritual humiliations each time: his friend/nemesis Paul Finch bangs Stifler’s mom and Stifler has a needlessly disgusting encounter with bodily fluids/excretions: accidental ingestion of semen in American Pie, unwitting recipient of a golden shower in American Pie 2, and purposeful munching of dog shit in American Wedding. (Along with Pink Flamingos and The Spy Who Shagged Me, I would include this as definitive evidence that there is nothing funny about ingesting shit. It finds the “if it bends it’s funny, if it breaks it isn’t” tipping point and breaks it but good.) A character like Stifler is perfect in small doses in a large ensemble because there are more than enough audience surrogates to share in mutual disgust. But his increased presence in American Pie 2, and finally his second lead (behind Jim) in American Wedding is simply too much of a good/bad/annoying thing.

In retrospect, I think the franchise was fortunate to have Paul and Chris Weitz as co-directors on the first film because they proved effortless at evincing natural performances from all the young actors, pulling out just the right raunchy/sentimental tone from the script and at straddling the line between comedy and awkwardness. Something else that is very upfront in the screenplay of American Pie and which gets scuttled in the second and third films (primarily because of the loss of most of the female characters) are the dual notions that boys and girls can be just as confounded about the complexities of sex, and that girls can be just as into wanting sex as guys without being branded as sluts and whores.

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