AMERICAN WEDDING

The lovable, sex-mad youths from those "American Pie" pig-outs are back, and guess who’s getting married?

CAST: Jason Biggs, Seann William Scott, Alyson Hannigan, Eddie Kaye Thomas, Thomas Ian Nicholas, January Jones, Eugene Levy, Molly Cheek, Deborah Rush, Fred Willard, Tim Allen

DIRECTOR: Jesse Dylan

"Seann William Scott, the one real breakout actor from the ‘Pie’ trilogy, shares Jim Carrey's ability — and the older actor's slightly helter-skelter good looks — to pivot from humorously grotesque to freakily scary with a single maniacal smile. It's a talent that proves of particular value in ‘American Wedding,’ because Scott's energy helps keep the movie going during its sluggish moments and animates its few bright spots…Disposable as toilet paper, ‘American Wedding’ raises the question of how far mainstream the gross-out comedy can go…most gross-out movie comedies revolve around middle-class kids acting out a seemingly endless series of juvenile fantasies, many involving bodily functions. They're old enough to marry, sure, but what does it mean that all these kids still aren't potty-trained?" --Manohla Dargis, The Los Angeles Times

"If you do not bring pride, good taste or sense to this third ‘American Pie’ installment, you'll have a good time. Of course, you won't admit it in front of respectable company…The movie, which includes the requisite gross-out scenes (involving the wedding cake, as well as a nasty doggy doo moment) and a tour-de-force dance contest between Stifler and a muscular gay performer, is anti-serious, liberated and often very funny." --Desson Howe, The Washington Post

"Once they've done the apple pie, explored the many ways one can play the flute, spiked a beer with semen, and had students urinating on each other from balconies, how do they top themselves? Okay, nobody's ever thought of ruining a wedding cake by dropping shaved pubic hairs into a ventilating system before, but will that be enough?…‘American Wedding’ is stupid, lowbrow, pandering teenage trash…There are a couple of surprises in the I-can't-believe-they're-doing-this vein, but mostly, ‘Pie 3’ is an aimless charade of doggy poo, latex breasts and really, really bad language." --Jack Mathews, The New York Daily News

"Having survived high school and college in the first two ‘American Pie’ movies, here they are in ‘American Wedding,’ still ankle-deep in precious bodily fluids and doggy do, and although the movie cheerfully offends all civilized notions of taste, decorum, manners and hygiene, it has a sweetness that is impossible to discount, and it is often very funny… There is no joke too low for the movie to stoop to, no melodrama too broad, no human weakness too pitiful to satirize, and yet, because the filmmakers and the actors like these characters and wish them well and want them to somehow live happily ever after, all is redeemed. The movie is vulgar? Vulgarity is when we don't laugh. When we laugh, it's merely human nature." --Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

"The movie grinds slowly, inexorably toward the bawdy, bad-taste shenanigans that observe the decorum usually found only in the letters section of Penthouse Forum. The limp, boring jokes are relentless. The makers of ‘Wedding’ have so effectively managed to make offensiveness seem tame that this could be subversion financed by the religious right…With any luck ‘American Wedding’ should finally finish off the series." --Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times

"No one fornicates with a pie or gets super-glued to their privates in ‘American Wedding,’ the third and final installment of the ‘American Pie’ trilogy, but there’s plenty of penis-related disasters going on in director Jesse Dylan’s ode to friendship, fidelity and clandestine fellatio…Traditional morality hidden under a juvenile infatuation with excrement and big boobs has always been the films’ bread and butter, but ‘American Wedding’ (more shamelessly than its predecessors) only perfunctorily pays lip service to wholesomeness while enthusiastically indulging in its disgusting pranks. It’s a clear sign that the filmmakers’ creative well has run dry, but it’s also an honest turn for a series that owes its success less to smarmy platitudes than to the humorlessly infantile image of a teenager having sex with a gooey desert." --Nicholas Schager, Slant Magazine

"That's right, they're back, the sexually obsessed guys from the last two American Pie films. Only this time, they're now young adults out of college, one of them is getting married, one of them is resolutely fighting the urge to grow up, and they're all continuing to wear out their welcome…The real star of the film is Seann William Scott, whose Stifler is unredeemable in ways never before brought to the screen (and that's not a compliment). He still talks like the most obnoxious kid in the junior high lunch room, still sees everything in terms of how much female flesh it will bring him, still cracks wise in ways that would make Penthouse blush…Hopefully, this is the last slice of ‘American Pie.’" --Chris Kaltenbach, The Baltimore Sun

"The infamously violated pie is tossed away for a wedding cake (which receives its own violation), but otherwise the series is back on familiar ground…The film stutters along in stops and starts as Dylan hurtles it from one rude, crude and elaborately lewd gag to another…His eyes popping and his face twisting in elastic expressions of his basest desires, Scott's Stifler has become so unapologetically crude that he threatens to devolve into a lower species…It's often helplessly hilarious in its adolescent gross-out way, yet the cast periodically invests the film with sweetness." --Sean Axmaker, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"‘AmericanWedding,’ this week's entry in Holly wood's summer of endless sequels, has some gut-busting moments, but for the most part the thrill is gone from what the ads describe as the ‘thrilling climax’ of this gross-out franchise…Let's hope the producers make good on their promise to let well enough alone — and not inflict ‘American Baby’ and ‘American Divorce’ on us." --Lou Lumenick, The New York Post

"‘American Wedding’ is clearly the Stiff-meister's movie and Seann William Scott makes the most of his character's extended face time with headlong fury, especially when Stifler makes what, for him, is the ultimate sacrifice by dirty dancing in a Chicago gay bar. As with many things in this slice of ‘Pie,’ that whole sequence is outrageously inappropriate. But it also exposes the gentle heart concealed deep within both this raucous franchise and its most disreputable character." --Gene Seymour, Newsday