The Pie boys are back

FILM REVIEW

American Pie: Reunion
DIRECTED BY: Hayden Schlossberg, Jon Hurwitz
STARRING: Sean William Scott, Jason Biggs, Alyson Hannigan, Eugene Levy
CERT: 16

American Pie struck a major chord with movie audiences back in 1999. It was Porky’s for the Internet generation and became a standard-bearer for the new breed of gross-out comedy. It was also very funny and, underneath all the juvenile gags, there was a genuine sweetness about it, a couple of factors that were sorely diluted as the series progressed.
Two big screen sequels and several dreadful straight-to-DVD features later, the original cast are back for one more hurrah. Though I bet on it being the last. The gang is together again because the high school class of ‘99 is throwing a 13-year reunion. Which I’m sure happens all the time and is not just some desperate coincidence. As a stage-setter, it doesn’t inspire much confidence, but it turns out that Reunion has a few decent tricks up its sleeve.
The lads have gotten older and some of them have even grown up a bit. Jim (Biggs) and his band camp girl, Michelle (Hannigan), are married with a kid and the spark is gone. Oz (Chris Klein) is a sports commentator and a failed reality dance show contestant, whose infatuation with Heather (Mena Suvari) is long in the past. Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) is married and settled down but clearly still has a thing for Vicky (Tara Reid). Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) is a globetrotting cool cat, but discovers this time around that he has competition for a certain older woman.
Stifler (Scott), well, Stifler is stuck in the party time warp. Which is fine by me, because he’s the one who holds this show together, providing most of the laughs and squirms.
With the writer/director team of Schlossberg and Hurwitz (Harold and Kumar) at the helm, Reunion should have better than it is. For these guys, the writing is strangely bland at times and there are a few too many heart-to-heart scenes for anyone’s liking, as if the lads were contractually obliged to tie up loose ends to story strands that were never that interesting to begin with.
There’s just about enough laughs and good will to drag it over the line for a medal and for good measure there’s a fine soundtrack of ’90s music.
Lest we forget, there is the always enjoyable Eugene Levy as Jim’s dad, who has a long overdue run-in with the ever-enticing Stifler’s mom, played by the excellent Jennifer Coolidge.
They have a starring role in the end credits, too, if you happen to hang around long enough to, ahem, enjoy them.

The Lucky One
DIRECTED BY: Scott Hicks
STARRING: Zac Efron, Taylor Schilling, Blythe Danner
CERT: 12A

The Notebook and Message in a Bottle were fine movies, but for every decent screen adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel, there’s a Dear John lurking in the multiplex, waiting to eat your soul. The Lucky One is the latest of these syrupy, life-sucking entities.
This one stars Zac Efron, who’s grown some stubble since High School Musical, but hasn’t quite got the hang of this acting thing yet. But someone is determined the boy will be a star, so here he is, playing soldiers in the sand with his friends. Efron is Logan, a US Marine in Iraq, who finds a photo of a pretty American girl, with a note on the back to ‘stay safe’. Which he does, unlike his buddies, who didn’t spot the picture on the ground and so didn’t conveniently step away from the spot where a bomb was about to explode.
Logan is the lucky fella, the lad who survives three tours while all around him get the flak.
His duty done, Logan decides he will find this girl in the lucky photo and tracks her down online to Louisiana. Which is a long way from Colorado, but sure he decides to walk anyway, dragging his poor faithful dog Zeus along with him for the company. There’s lots of nice scenery, though and plenty of time for handsome brooding.
The lucky woman turns out to be Beth (Schilling), a single mother who runs a kennel with her grandmother (Blythe Danner). But now that he’s found her, instead of telling her why he traipsed all this way, Logan gets all moody and mysterious and lets on he’s only looking for an ’auld job. Because every lonely girl needs a handyman around the place, Beth hires him, even though she doesn’t like him, even though really she does, especially when the sun catches his bare torso at just the right angle.
Things get a tad complicated when her ex husband, the angry local cop (Mad Men’s Jay R Ferguson) turns up threatening to take her son, Ben (Riley Thomas Stewart) away, on the grounds that she’s consorting with an unsavoury sort. He’d have more grounds for a legal challenge if he simply accused the pretty couple of indulging in the sappiest excesses of modern screen romance.
The Lucky One is directed by Scott Hicks, whose very fine film Shine was nominated for several Oscars back in the ’90s and who also made the under-rated 2001 Stephen King adaptation, Hearts in Atlantis, from a script by William Goldman (Butch and Sundance, All The President’s Men, The Princess Bride).
Hicks clearly knows what makes a good movie, but screenwriter Will Fetters is no Goldman. Though, in fairness, the great man himself might struggle with the stuff that pours forth from the wild imagination of Nicholas Sparks.