Metacritic Film

American Pie

Starring Jason Biggs, Eugene Levy, Chris Klein, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Seann William Scott, Shannon Elizabeth, Alyson Hannigan, and Natasha Lyonne

MPAA RATING: R for strong sexuality, crude sexual dialogue, language and drinking, all involving teens

Universal Pictures
Comedy
95 minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters July 9, 1999

Four high school friends enter into a pact to lose their virginity before graduation, encountering apple pies and other embarrassing speedbumps along the way.

WRITTEN BY
Adam Herz

DIRECTED BY
Paul Weitz

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

58 / 100

Critic Reviews

100 Dallas Observer Glenn Gaslin
It's painful, it's real, and it's probably the funniest thing you'll see this year...a teen sexploitation classic.
100 San Francisco Chronicle
In addition to being extremely funny, the film has a warm spirit and respect for the characters.
88 New York Post
Vulgar and lewd and raunchy like you wouldn't believe, and absolutely hilarious from beginning to end.
80 Los Angeles Times
Unusual in its ability to mix bodily functions humor with a sincere and unlooked-for sense of decency.
80 Mr. Showbiz
Pie has some nice surprises and is enjoyable in a smutty, sitcom way. It offers up the outrageousness of "There's Something About Mary" without wallowing in cruelty.
75 Miami Herald
Guaranteed to beguile anyone who can remember the joy -- and agony -- of anticipating the first time.
75 Entertainment Weekly
A lively, disposable hybrid of the sincere and the synthetic.
75 USA Today
The presence of "Election's" Chris Klein as the male contingent's most sensitive member only emphasizes how much smarter that high school comedy was.
75 New York Daily News
The successful bits, along with an amiable cast of losers and their prom-night prey, make American Pie a winner.
75 Chicago Sun-Times
It is not inspired, but it's cheerful and hard-working and sometimes funny, and--here's the important thing--it's not mean.
75 Philadelphia Inquirer
Exceptionally funny, unexpectedly tender, and lewder than a teenage boy's dreams.
70 TV Guide
Alternately sweet and raucous comedy.
67 Portland Oregonian
Distinct from others of its lowly stripe because of the credibly real-feeling performances by much of its youthful ensemble.
63 Chicago Tribune Marc Caro
Both funny and foul, alternately frank and full of it.
60 TNT RoughCut M. Meghan McCarthy
What is refreshing about this film is that most of the characters seem like real people.
60 Variety
Cheesy homage to a level of horniness Austin Powers could only imagine will be a dream movie for many a teenage boy.
60 Newsweek Jeff Giles
A surprisingly earnest and cautionary movie, careful to attract female viewers and not freak parents out too badly.
60 LA Weekly
The movie lover in you will recoil; your inner sophomore will rejoice.
50 Salon.com
I'd appreciate toilet humor more if it weren't so often so unimaginative.
50 San Francisco Examiner
A limp excuse for a coming-of-age flick, more interested in sexploits than sex, more adept at gross-out than girls.
50 Austin Chronicle
A go-for-the-lowest-common-denominator grab bag of raunchy sex gags and freakish outbursts. The cool thing is that it works.
50 Chicago Reader
Another giggly gross-out comedy for teenagers.
50 Charlotte Observer
The story was primitive, the characters unmemorable, the direction unsophisticated, the writing cliched, the photography and music drab, the pacing uneven, the acting varying from adroitly funny to exaggerated.
40 The New York Times
Among this year's bumper crop of shallow teen-age movies, it is the shallowest and the most prurient.
40 Village Voice
Returns the teen movie to the uncomplicated glory days of "Porky's" and "Losin' It."
38 Baltimore Sun
An uninteresting take on a tired formula that is only occasionally funny and usually pretty gross.
30 Film.com
The fact that isolated bits are amusing shouldn't keep us from strongly noting that this movie really is pretty awful -- not at all worthy of guilty pleasure status.
30 Film.com
What really makes the film fall dead (although the preview audience I saw it with howled from beginning to end) are the actors and the way the characters have been scripted.
25 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Idiotic.
25 Boston Globe Jim Sullivan
Gross and tasteless...this high-school romp mixes the gross and tasteless with sentimental mush.

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