Review // My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2

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Fourteen years ago Nia Vardalos captured lightning in an olive oil bottle with My Big Fat Greek Wedding. The sweet and quirky story about a frumpy young woman named Toula (Vardalos) trying to find love while holding her large Greek family together struck a chord with audiences who were delighted with a romantic comedy with actual heart. It wasn’t just a hit with audiences either, critics praised the film for its sharp writing and Vardalos earned an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay. Fourteen years later the Canadian-born writer/actress attempts to recapture that magic with the long awaited sequel My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, and while the heart and humour are still here in spades, the film is let down by its central plot.

Picking up about seventeen years after the first film, little has changed for the Portokalos family. Toula and Ian (John Corbett) are split between work and smothering concern for their teenage daughter Paris. Toula’s parents Maria (Lainie Kazan) and Gus (Michael Constantine) have shifted their matchmaking energy from daughter to granddaughter, urging the not yet out of highschool Paris to find a nice Greek boy and get married. The assorted other Portokalos family members are their same old selves, barging through doors and shouting their two cents. However while the family are as close as ever it falls to Toula to care for her aging parents, and the family’s demands on her time are starting to have an effect on her marriage. Meanwhile, Gus’s efforts to trace the family lineage back to Alexander the Great reveal the fact that he and Maria were never officially married. While he resolves to change this immediately, Maria sees it as a new beginning, forcing Gus to work for her hand and throwing the whole family into chaos.

Much like the first film the sequel is sharply written and filled to the brim with surprisingly funny moments. While the humour is often broad and regularly plays the ethnic (see: Greek) card for laughs, Vardalos’ ability to juggle upwards of ten characters at a time is a skill barely achieved by entire sitcom writing rooms let alone a single screenwriter. In fact the film’s best moments are the scenes in which the entire family fills a room, firing dialogue back and forth, and keeping three or four running jokes in the air as they go. And while no one’s acting performance is going to earn accolades here, most are playing character bordering on caricature anyway.

Unfortunately, while the jokes come fast and furious, the film’s two central plot lines let it down. Our major concern is supposed to be Ian and Toula’s relationship. Yet, while the pair have supposedly been married for the last decade and a half, their first few scenes together feel like they haven’t talked since their wedding day. An early scene in which the couple go on a date to try to reignite the spark feels more like a pair of strangers trying to start the pilot light on an old water heater. The secondary plot line involving Maria and Gus’s non-existent marriage falls equally flat. The characters work well as comedic foils but the shift from goofy jokes about Windex to weepy montages is a startling change in tone. The first film worked because Toula was the rock in the middle of a hurricane of ridiculous characters; Vardalos’ decision to add flesh to some of these characters doesn’t pay off.

Still, the same innocent charm that earn the first film such love carries this one forward despite its flaws. Things like the painfully unfashionable soundtrack (Paris dances to Walk Like An Egyptian at her prom, as kids do these days), might earn scorn in other comedies but are somehow loveable here. The tacked-on side plots for secondary characters (Joey Fatone’s Angelo making a big reveal at the wedding being the highlight) have all the depth of a sitcom episode, yet still make you smile. The whole enterprise is so refreshingly free of irony and cynicism that it almost makes up for its near total lack of engaging story arc. Nora Ephron she ain’t, but Nia Vardalos deserves props for making a sweet, heartfelt film in days that often feel anything but. Or maybe I’m just a big softy.

Reviewed by Evan Arppe.