My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3: Film Review
While I remember enjoying My Big Fat Greek Wedding back in 2002 (when I was 13), I was shocked when a second film came out 14 years later and did so well that they have now made a third.
Following the death of her father Gus (Michael Constantine, who died in 2021), Toula (Nia Vardalos), her husband Ian (John Corbett), daughter Paris (Elena Kampouris), brother Nick (Louis Mandylor) and aunt Theia (Andrea Martin), and a couple of others, go to Greece to visit Gus’ hometown for the first time and meet some of his childhood friends at a reunion event.
The second Big Fat Greek Wedding felt pointless and a feeble excuse for a revisit with the Portokalos family. It felt like they didn’t have a great idea and made something out of nothing. The third film is the same – there is no reason for this to exist except that it is actually set in Greece for the first time. The concept is fine enough but Vardalos (who wrote the script again) clearly struggled to find subplots to sustain a feature-length film.
You can forgive a movie for being pointless if you still have a great time with it but this film, the first one to be directed by Vardalos, doesn’t achieve that either. It’s a harmless, easy watch but it’s also seriously unfunny. I laughed a couple of times but most of the jokes failed to land or were too cheap or silly to really work in the first place.
It also doesn’t connect on an emotional level. A rousing score is deployed at some moments to indicate when you should feel a burst of romance, sadness or a sense of celebration but it is working overtime to compensate for the fact that the story cannot make you feel this way. The score does a lot of heavy lifting but it cannot make up for a story that fails to hit the emotions it intends to.
There are some glimmers of hope though. Toula is still a likeable lead and I have more interest in Paris than the others because she pushes back against the expectation that she exists to just get married and have children. Plus, Martin really tries hard to make her awkward, TMI jokes work and is still the funniest of the bunch. The setting is also gorgeous and reminded me a lot of Mamma Mia!
My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 might hit the spot for diehard fans of the franchise but everybody else should look elsewhere for their comedy fix.
In cinemas from Friday 8th September