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I don’t want to overstep by ascribing any sort of intentional feminist status to the film, but though the guys may want sex more than anything (or think they do), none of the female characters exists (solely) as a sex object and none are treated as a cautionary tale or object of derision, for wanting or not wanting sex. Even the most archetypal and stereotypical sequence - you have a hot female foreign exchange student naked, looking at porn, and masturbating on your bed - gets turned on its head when Jim shows up, all gangly and ready for heaven knows what kind of action, and Nadia demands that he get naked as well by doing a striptease. It’s the height of male fantasy crossed with the nadir of male sexual nightmare, but it’s funny and embarrassing and sweet too.

Herz deigns to up the ante in the sequel and American Pie 2’s centerpiece is a sequence that runs for nearly 12 minutes in the unrated version, and ends the first half of the film on a delirious comic high. Designed as an escalating series of truth or dares between Jim, Stifler, Finch, and the two women whose house they are painting, it provides some kind of demented definitive answer to the age-old question: How far will a guy go to watch two women make out? It also provides an analogue counterpart to Nadia and Jim’s antics being broadcast on the Web in the first film, via some walkie-talkies whose frequency gets picked up throughout the local vicinity. It’s vulgar and provocative and crude and unpredictable and it finds ways to push the audience’s buttons and get us to laugh at the audacity of the scenario.

What holds the whole affair back are two examples of weaknesses previously cited: There isn’t enough action to go around (Oz and Kevin are more or less bystanders to the whole affair and the frequent cuts to them angling to see inside the house are unnecessary) and because the women aren’t featured again (save for a sex coda), they aren’t able to emerge as defined in any way, despite holding the sexual upper-hand the entire time. These faults are most visible when pushed to their extremes in the third film’s similar sequence - the bachelor party gone awry - which makes no good use of any of the actors and leaves a distinctly unsavory aftertaste in one’s mouth.

Director J.B. Rogers - who has directed a few other films, but has most of his credits as first unit or second assistant director on close to 30 films, including nearly all of the Farrelly Brothers oeuvre - isn’t as deft at working his way through both the sentimental and the outrageous, as either set of brothers can be at the peak of their game. When the film engages in the former, it feels forced and when it goes for the latter, more often than not, it feels too boxed in, constrained by its very efforts to be naughty.

Unlike most of the 80 Chapter Twos I have weighed in on up to now, it isn’t easy for me to base an opinion on American Pie 2 solely on the film’s own merits. It shines brightly when compared to how dispiriting American Wedding comes off, but it remains on the fringes of the shadow cast by American Pie. I am able to transfer a lot of the excess goodwill from the first film on to the second, and if it’s sloppier and cruder and more weighted down with sequences that drag, it’s still time I consider well-spent in the company of the class of ’99 from East Great Falls High.

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