AMERICAN PIE 2

Odd that a summer-movie sequel would take as its theme the need for change. That’s the platitude voiced by director J.B. Rogers and writer Adam Herz at the end of American Pie 2, after the film has laboriously rehashed most of the raunchy gags that made the original a surprise hit in 1999. Do audiences really want second helpings?

Certainly American Pie’s characters do: they’ve returned from their first year away at college hungry for a repeat of the farcical sexual indignities they suffered in senior year of high school. And so Jim (Jason Biggs) still longs for Euro bombshell Nadia (Shannon Elizabeth), who exposed his inadequacies on the Internet in the previous film, and Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) bones up on tantra in expectation of round two with Stifler’s mom (Jennifer Coolidge). Meanwhile, Rogers and Herz reprise the gross beer joke with a different beverage and body fluid and the Internet fiasco with cell phones and CBs. The latter sequence touches on the subversion that made the first Pie worth seeing — the way the women are sexually in control. Then again, the guys are infantile. No wonder the classier performers, like Mena Suvari and Natasha Lyonne, hang by the sidelines. Although scenes with Eugene Levy are always welcome, this is one stale pastry.

— Peter Keough