(MA15+) **
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Director: Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg.
Cast: Jason Biggs, Alyson Hannigan, Seann William Scott, Chris Klein, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Eddie Kaye Thomas, Eugene Levy, Mena Suvari, Tara Reid, Jennifer Coolidge.
BACK in 1999, American Pie helped respark a genre that no one knew they were missing - the teen gross-out sex comedy.
Over three films it proved to be a surprisingly successful recipe, although four subsequent straight-to-DVD spin-offs left a bad taste.
Now the original cast is back - yep, all of them - but does anyone really want another piece of Pie?
It's 13 years since Jim (Biggs), Oz (Klein), Stifler (Scott), Finch (Thomas), and Kevin (Nicholas) graduated from East Great Falls High School, and because they're class didn't hold a 10-year reunion, a belated gathering has been organised to bring them all back home (a pretty big stretch for a reunion plot).
Stifler remains stuck in the past, Jim, who married Michelle (Hannigan) in the third film, has a family, Oz is a minor celebrity with an obnoxious model for a girlfriend, Finch tells tall tales of worldly travel, and Kevin is a slightly emasculated but much-loved husband.
Returning to their old stomping ground and the scene of their blossoming as men is naturally going to bring up memories and feelings regarding lost loves, diminished youth and a quarter-life crisis.
But when you blend this with the usual embarrasing nudity, sexual injuries, and inappropriate behaviour of the American Pie series, it's a weird concoction. The franchise has always mixed heart and a certain sweetness with its teen sex-comedy japes, but here we have the teen sex-comedy without the teens. Which is slightly off-putting.
Those high school pranks become adult felonies, the juvenile lustings get creepier, romantic indiscretions have the potential to tear families apart, and some of the embarrassments just become plain sad in the hands of thirty-somethings. What works with the innocence and desperation of adolescents feels awkward and unfortunate for grown-ups, but not in a painfully funny way.
That's not to say there aren't any laughs here - there are still a few, mostly courtesy of Stifler's man-child antics and a few pearlers from Jim's dad (Levy).
The heart is also present and the adult problems facing the old gang are far more interesting than the gross-out and sex-related antics this time around, even though the issues tend toward the simplistic.
It is good to see the old gang back together again, although you can't help but feel many of them are desperate for the pay cheque these days. Only Hannigan and Scott have gone on to much beyond the American Pie series, despite the franchise's initial success catapulting many of the stars briefly onto the A-list in the early '00s.
Ultimately, this may be one piece of pie too many, but at least it's a step up from the straight-to-DVD releases that have been sullying the series' name for the past decade. Still, that's probably not saying much.