I hadn't planned on watching this, but I was much more impressed than I expected to be. I remembered being kind of mildly bored with American Wedding. And I had seen the first and second movies several times, mostly during college.
There was a guy in my social circle that was roughly the same person as Stiffler. To be honest, I never saw him during party situations, but he was similarly loud, crude, and unusually cruel to girls. He cheated on his girlfriend for a long time while he was at college. I have no idea what he's up to now.
Stiffler is somehow the heart of this movie. Everyone else had already established some traits that made them good people. In this movie, Stiffler gets an arc. He comes out of the movie having grown up a little. He acknowledges that he's a jerk, but he also makes a few noble gestures toward the end.
Each of the characters gets a bit of a story, but most of them aren't too noteworthy, or they don't resonate as well with me. What I did like was Finch's story. Finch arrives, and tells how he's been living this wild, bohemian life, traveling all over the world. By the end, it's revealed that none of that is true. He's working as an assistant manager at Staples.
This made me realize that we spend most of high school comparing ourselves to each other, competing for grades, competing for friendship, recognition, sexual experience. And as we get older, we view those types of competitions as meaningless. But we replace them with other ones. We get caught up with who has a better job, who's bought a better car, who managed to make national news.
I found that after getting married, I didn't really care about other people's dating habits. I still cared about my friends, but that's because they were my friends. But it was no longer a point of competition. Now the race is on to have babies, to buy houses. To become millionaires?
I have a soft spot for nearly everyone I graduated with, although I don't express it often… or ever. But I would never hold their job against them, their spouse, or lack of one, their children, or lack of them. The only thing I hold against them is how they treat me.
Yeah, that got pretty far off of the movie.
Some of the character's stories aren't interesting. Tara Reid and her guy have an annoying plot, that seems to be filled with getting needlessly offended and being dumb. Chris Klein's story is a bit more entertaining, but still seems to be hammed up in a way it didn't need to be. For a guy like him, he really should have known better. Jim and Michelle have a decent story, but the overall message - about the need to make time for each other in a marriage - doesn't seem to be the point that the story makes. The actual message is more about being honest and communicating with each other.
So the more I've thought about it, I suppose there are a lot of things not right with this movie. But it still had some redeeming aspects.
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