When a film is so intentionally chaotic, does it qualify as a mess?
Stone definitely delivers on a style here, though "bad 90s music video" gets pretty grating by hour two. As for the substance, I'm not sure it lands.
He'll find an effective messaging, and instead of taking the win, he'll beat the dead horse (as Stone is wont to do). A perfect example of this is the sitcom portrayal of the childhood abuse of Mallory. I thought it…
So, so bad.
It's funny to see a sequel come two decades later, and look this much worse than the original.
Poorly conceived, poorly executed. Skip it.
I gotta say, I'm surprised and impressed. After a really weak opening scene I was afraid it would just be lazy rehashings of old jokes, they proved me wrong.
Well, not wrong, per se; they definitely rehashed a fair number of old jokes, and, yeah, a few were pretty lazy. Plenty on masturbation or body fluids or Jim's dad or Stifler's mom or hookups gone awry--you know the game--and of course they found some topless twenty somethings.
But some weren't…
This starts off kind of hokey, especially when compared to the efficient and more stylish remake, and I was pretty worried about that and the pacing (it's fully FORTY minutes longer; that's nearly half again the length).
But then came the exploitation-level violence.
This is NOT a mostly fun action comedy. This is a brutal, depressing, and above all unforgiving story of a man taking on the Good Old Boy crime syndicate that has taken over his town.
All told, I think I do still prefer the fun remake, but this is almost certainly the better film.
