American Wedding (2003)

There is a moment in American Wedding, the third installment of a franchise that has outlived several of its own cast members' careers, when the proceedings relocate to a Chicago gay bar so that four grown men may obtain a wedding dress. The patrons are at first hostile to Stifler's loud insecurity, then won over by his dance routine, and finally enlisted to supply strippers for a bachelor party. This is the film's entire engagement with queer life: a set piece, a punchline, a choreographed détente. One large man named Bear becomes a recurring helpful prop. We are meant to find this warm. It is, at best, a gesture in the general direction of tolerance, executed with the subtlety of a foghorn and the sincerity of a beer commercial.

The rest of the picture concerns itself with matters of greater urgency. Jim shaves himself and destroys a wedding cake through a kitchen vent. A ring is fed to a dog. Michelle's grandmother-in-law disapproves of her for not being Jewish, a point raised and abandoned within a single scene. Women exist here as objectives, obstacles, or orifices, and Michelle's sister Cadence is passed between two suitors like a casserole at a potluck. The film's attitude toward the female body is that of a twelve-year-old with a camcorder. There is no argument being made, no position being advanced, only a series of escalating indignities performed for the approval of a paying audience.

What keeps the enterprise from true offensiveness is its total absence of conviction. It preaches nothing. It critiques nothing. It has no interest in money, race, climate, or the human soul, and it would be unfair to hold it to standards it never aspired to meet. The film opened at number one and made a great deal of money, which is the only moral it possesses. We classify it, we note its modest and incidental borrowings from the culture around it, and we move on to the next vintage.

{"thematic_tags": ["sequel", "box_office_number_one"]}