My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 Review: A Mess

The third time is…whatever the opposite of a spell is.
Photo: Courtesy of Yannis Drakoulidis/Focus Features

After release in 2002 My big fat Greek wedding became a lot of things: one of the Highest-grossing indie films in the history; the most financially lucrative romantic comedy any times; and an Oscar nominee for its screenplay, written by star Nia Vardalos, who based the love story between the awkward (and Greek) Toula Portokalos (Vardalos) and the dreamy (and non-Greek) Ian Miller (John Corbett) on her autobiography A woman game.

However, despite its success, this sleeper hit was never a great film. Sublime by a charming cast, My big fat Greek wedding It was mostly a collection of cute clichés, relatable but familiar observations about immigrant families, and far too many jokes about the medicinal properties of Windex. Do you know who finds Windex comedy – an extremely niche genre – funny? Your grandmother, who didn’t see it by chance My big fat Greek wedding ten times in the theater.

Since the first part was so well received, a sequel was finally released in 2016. And now, seven years later, there is a third Big fat Greek wedding. While the first part focused on the wedding of Nia and Ian and the second on the remarriage of Toula’s parents Maria (Lainie Kazan) and Gus (Michael Constantine), the third part revolves around a reunion in the village where the both of them The now deceased Gus was raised. (Constantine died in 2021 at age 94, making the idea that Gus is also dead even more painful.)

To fulfill her father’s request to pass on his diary to his childhood friends, Toula travels to Greece with Ian. her college-age daughter, Paris (Elena Kampouros); Toula’s brother Nick (Louis Mandylor); the outspoken aunts Frieda (Maria Vacratsis) and Voula (Andrea Martin); and Aristotle (Elias Kacavas), Paris’ ex, whom Voula “accidentally” hires as her assistant on the trip. They all hope the visit will allow them to reconnect with their roots. Then they arrive and find that there are only a few people living in Gus’ village and almost no one is coming to the supposed meeting. Of course, Toula has no choice but to try to track down her father’s buddies – which she could easily have done on the Internet without leaving the comfort of her home – while everyone else in her family is doing theoretically amusing things like that Trimming your nose etc. Ear hair at the breakfast table (Nick) or making friends with local monks (Ian). By the way, if you assume that there is a wedding at some point in this 91-minute film, it somehow feels longer OppenheimerWell, I don’t want to spoil anything for you. But I will say this: Yes, it does.

The landscape in My big fat Greek wedding 3Shot largely in Corfu and Athens, the film is great, but everything else about the film’s construction is an absolute mess. Vardalos, serving as both director and writer for the first time, should have a better feel for these characters and their journey than anyone else. But this third chapter in the Greek wedding Saga feels less like a coherent film and more like a collection of scenes simply placed next to each other without any sense of larger themes or flow.

In one insane sequence after another, people have conversations or experiences that come to a screeching halt before they get anywhere. As mentioned, Ian befriends a monk who lives in a seaside hut, but their conversations essentially consist of a few sentences and ultimately amount to nothing more than intrigue. Toula and Ian get some alone time on a mini trip, but instead of using these on-screen moments to show us what their marriage looks like in the empty nest phase, the film delivers a montage of Toula falls off her horse repeatedly, followed by a not particularly insightful speech about how worried she is about her daughter and her mother. (Kasan appears in some scenes where Maria is struggling with memory loss.)

Any attempts to create real conflict – once again there is a storyline in which a parent objects to a non-Greek marrying his Greek child – are resolved so quickly that they can hardly be considered quandaries. And the new characters are somehow even more thinly sketched than the existing ones, particularly Victory, a distant cousin of Portokalos and self-proclaimed mayor of the village, whose slogan is “Number one, the best,” as in “Greece: Number one, the best” or “Supermodels: number one, the best.” You know, things real people say all the time!

In accordance with My big fat Greek wedding Traditionally, a joke that is mildly amusing is repeated until you want to stick your head in the cup holder at your stadium seat. (If you think it’s funny when Louis Mandylor screams outdoors during a cold shower, imagine how much funnier it will be when John Corbett does it again just a few minutes later!) But at least there’s less this time Windex gags – only two in my count. And as much as I hope this film is the third part of a trilogy, I still appreciate the deadpan speeches from the great Andrea Martin, the only person in this film who actually gets some laughs. If the My big fat Greek The franchise continues to grow – and it really, really shouldn’t – but at least one good thing will come out of it: more paychecks for Andrea Martin. Grandpa!