American Wedding
Rating: Three Stars
Starring: Jason Biggs, Alyson Hannigan, Seann William Scott, Eugene Levy, January Jones. Written by Adam Herz. Directed by Jesse Dylan. Rated R for sexual content, language and crude humor.

By AUSTIN O’CONNOR
Sun Staff
For all their outrageousness and gross-out jokes, there’s a subversive sweetness that runs just beneath the surface of the American Pie movies that makes them nearly impossible to resist.
Sure, Jim (Jason Biggs) may have done strange things to an apple pie in the first movie, and he may have superglued himself to, um, himself in the second one. But the loser’s heart is always in the right place, even if other parts of his anatomy aren’t.
The same can be said for American Wedding, the third installment of the Pie series. The chaos this time revolves around the impending nuptials of Jim and band camp geek Michelle (Alyson Hannigan), freshly graduated from college and ready to walk down the aisle together.
The wedding is little more than an excuse for the Pie gang (original directors Chris and Paul Weitz produced this one, ceding directing duties to Jesse Dylan) to have some lowbrow fun with the various rituals that build up to the big event. The movie opens in typically jaw-dropping style, with a ritzy restaurant proposal sequence that manages to include two staples of the franchise: the cringe-inducing heart-to-heart between Jim and his clueless dad (Eugene Levy, now an acting god to Gen Y filmgoers thanks to this role and his appearances in the Christopher Guest improv movies), and the public humiliation of Jim, who ends up pantsless in the middle of the crowded dining room.
All the wedding ritual bases are then touched: the engagement party (during which Jim’s friends complain about the lack of a keg), the choosing of the wedding dress, the predictably raucous bachelor party, the rehearsal dinner with unintentionally offensive toasts and, of course, problems between Jim and his prospective in-laws, played by Fred Willard and Deborah Rush.
Things are consistently funny enough to forgive a few missteps, such as the waste of Willard, Levy’s improv colleague in Guest’s Best In Show and A Mighty Wind. Unlike Levy, whose neurotic delivery turns his every line into a comic gem, Willard never seems as funny when there’s a script that requires sticking to.
It may be that there’s no room for new characters in the series, since the ones we know already are funny enough on their own. Wedding pushes the envelope of tolerance for Jim’s trash mouth buddy Stifler (Seann William Scott), focusing so intently on him that it could well be subtitled Stifler Saves The Day.
Still, it’s pretty darn fun to watch the defiantly obnoxious Stifler, now a jarhead football coach and perched precariously on the fringes of the wedding invitation list at movie’s start, change his stripes and go in cognito as a nice guy to woo Cadence, the fetching young sister of the bride. And his tug-of-war with bookish Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) over Cadence’s attention provides big laughs, especially for diehard Pie watchers, who know all about Finch’s history with Stifler’s mom.
It’s that history that at this point makes the series so appealing. The punchlines may not be as rat-a-tat in American Wedding as they were four years ago in the original, but the relationships, between old friends, fathers and sons and bride and groom, are deeper and funnier now.
Considering its gross-out roots, it’s an accomplishment worth celebrating that by Wedding’s unexpectedly touching end, most of the movie’s big laughs come not from sight gags or dirty jokes, but from the comfortable feeling that we know these characters so well, and like them so much.