My Big Fat Greek Wedding was not one of those films. It was a hit precisely because its seemingly specific subject matter transcended cultures and time periods. It was about families welcoming in outsiders, and formerly repressed individuals defining their identity. Those things are still relevant today, yet one of the main failings of My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 is that it entirely, seemingly willingly, misses that point. The gang all arrange to chip in for the ceremony, adding the big-ness, fat-ness and Greek-ness to proceedings, while Toula and Ian navigate the realities of being two first-time parents with a daughter going off to college and no time for each other. Firstly, the narrative gymnastics the film has to go through in order to set up another titular wedding is excruciating to watch, with three or four other options casually drifting by as the writers attempt to shoehorn in a celebration that could have easily been substituted for a something fresher. My Big Fat Greek Christmas, for example, or Funeral, if they wanted to go a little darker. But this is a film of missed opportunities and dropped storylines. While it’s safe to say that no one is going into this expecting depth or even particularly well-developed characters, it feels lazy in its execution. It’s biggest crime is having too many good ideas, but never following up on any of them. There’s a story about the strain becoming a carer for elderly relatives can have on a marriage, and another about the stress of having parents (and extended families) from entirely different cultures, pulling you in two directions. These would both be better films that what My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 ultimately gets to be. The jokes are there, but there’s little wit to them this time. The original succeeded because it managed to poke fun at everyone on screen, but always with a well-meaning wink at the audience. This time, the jokes are so broad and oftentimes dumb that no such gesture is necessary. There’s also the callbacks, which are frequent enough to immediately ruin the original gags they’re referencing. Oh, and John Stamos is in this one! But then something briefly changes, and a sliver of that old magic is back. A sequence near the end of the film manages to summon up such warmth that it colors the rest of the film just by being there. Suddenly it’s about something – about the experiences women have with love across multiple generations, and makes you wish that the other 90 minutes had such focus and such grace. I wanted desperately for the entire film to capture that same indescribable, money-making magic, but the fact that it ignores almost everything it has going for it makes this a frustrating and dispiriting watch. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 is in UK cinemas now.
