American Pie Presents: Girls' Rules (2020)

There is a moment in the American Pie extended universe when a franchise looks at its own reflection and decides the reflection needs a ponytail. Girls' Rules arrives as the ninth overall installment and the fifth spin-off, a gender-flipped reworking of a script originally conceived in 2010 around four male students chasing the same female classmate. Universal hired new writers in 2017 to invert the chromosomes, and the result is a film that wears its premise like a borrowed jacket. Four friends at East Great Falls band together in their senior year to get what they want, which turns out to be largely the same thing the boys wanted, pursued with the same locker-room arithmetic. The casting is notably more diverse than the 1999 original, though every performer is sorted neatly into a familiar teen-comedy drawer: the shy one, the paranoid one, the expert in adult novelties, the lacrosse bruiser. Diversity of faces, orthodoxy of function.

The mood of empowerment is announced rather than argued. Annie, Kayla, Michelle and Stephanie make a pact, suffer the usual misunderstandings, and arrive at the usual pairings, including a chastened jock punched and ejected from a party for calling Stephanie a name. This gesture toward sisterhood coexists comfortably with a plot that treats a vibrating pair of panties as a punchline and a principal in chains as a running gag. One character's entire personality is her enthusiasm for John F. Kennedy, which the film presents without irony and without interrogation. There is no engagement with racial dynamics, no environmental concern, no economic critique, no celebration of varied bodies, and no interior life beyond the pursuit of a new transfer student named Grant. The film is the first in the franchise to contain no nudity, a restraint that reads less as maturation than as contractual caution.

Critics were unkind. The Hollywood Reporter likened the enterprise to two straight girls performing for a male audience, and the New York Times observed that the original was tasteless while this one is flavorless. That verdict is fair and also beside the point. This is a product assembled from a template, aimed at an audience that already knows the jokes, and it lectures nobody about anything. We should be grateful for small mercies, and we should also note that gratitude is not the same as praise.