MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING 2
Universal Pictures
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten for Shockya, d-based on Rotten Tomatoes
Grade: C-
Director: Kirk Jones
Written by: Nia Vardalos
Cast: Nia Vardalos, John Corbett, Michael Constantine, Lainie Kazan, Andrea Martin
Screened at: AMC Empire, NYC, 3/21/16
Opens: March 25, 2016
This movie is so sit-comish like that I wondered why the background music is Greek rather than the usual elevator scores that we hear on equally banal comedies like “Two Broke Girls.” A major segment, particularly in the first hour, is so embarrassing that I felt like crawling under my seat, with “humor” so ethnic that I felt like watching thirty hours of “Mad Men” as an antidote. Nor is this understandable because of its status as a sequel to the year 2002 version, which despite its own imbecility scored big at the box office. Perhaps the box office will be lively because there are so few PG-13 movies catering to the family crowd, those turned away by the off-color language and visuals of a Judd Apatow offering. Never mind that this film’s director, Kirk Jones, and writer-star Nia Vardalos, without citing a single four-letter word, are vulgar in their own way.
Family dramas and comedies are arguably the principal concern of the cinema. Some families are close, others might make you want to remain single for a lifetime. In both cases, dysfunction serves as the necessary conflict since without conflict, you could not sell literature, theater, or cinema. The large, close-to-suffocating family on exhibit here are an ensemble whose hub would be Toula (Nia Vadalos), a Greek-American, and her WASPish husband Ian (John Corbett), who often embarrass their seventeen-year-old daughter Paris (Elena Kampouris)—so named perhaps because with a Greek mom and an Anglo dad, they met-in-the-middle. For her part Toula is abashed in turn by her father Gus (Michael Constantine), who bores the audience with his belief that all the blessings of the world, and not just democracy and philosophy, have Greek origins. Gus told us in 2002 and now he tells us again that he, and perhaps his entire brood of cousins, uncles, aunts, and grandmas, are direct descendants of Alexander the Great, who conquered Persia in 331 B.C. (Where is Alexander when we need him now?)
The hopelessly contrived engine that drives the movie forward is revved up when Gus discovers that when he thought he got married to Toula fifty years back, he actually did not, since during the confusion of wartime in their native Greece, the priest neglected to sign the marriage certificate for him and his bride, Maria (Lainie Kazan). Instead of burying the new information, he makes such a fuss that the extended family will soon have a wedding to attend, at least unless Maria, evaluating her half century with “a grouchy old man,” will say “no” to Gus’s proposal. Not that this is Gus’s only concern: he wants to find a boyfriend for his granddaughter, Paris who of course must be Greek. (By luck, Paris, breaking away from the family by desiring to leave her native Chicago and go to New York University, asks a boy to the high-school prom and he turns out to be Greek. Who needs a matchmaker?)
After energizing an audience with the brilliant “Waking Ned Devine” in 1998 (a lottery winner dies and the whole town conspires to claim the money), director Kirk Jones falls flat with a by-the-numbers picture that threatens his prospective audience with a suffocation similar to what Vardalos’s script forces on the acting ensemble.
Rated PG-13. 94 minutes. © Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – C-
Acting – C
Technical – C
Overall – C-
