Year: 2023

Runtime: 92 minutes

Writer/director: Nia Vardalos

Actors: Nia Vardalos, John Corbett, Lainie Kazan, Andrea Martin, Louis Mandylor, Melina Kotselou, Anthi Andreopoulou, Alexis Georgoulis, Giannis Vasilottis, Stephanie Nur, Elena Kampouris

By Sarah Manvel

The original “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” from 2002 had an unbeatable premise: spinster Greek-American lady with overbearing family (Toula, played by writer Nia Vardalos) falls in love with hot unhyphenated-American guy (Ian, played by John Corbett) and hilarious family mayhem ensues. It was, to everyone’s surprise, a smash hit, and remains one of the top-grossing independent movies of all time. Really no one should have been surprised: it took the standard ugly-duckling plot, combined it with a Prince Charming one, and seasoned to taste with every possible family-friendly permutation of difficult relatives. Of these Andrea Martin, the Canadian comedian, stole the entire movie as Aunt Voula. The one who offered to make the vegetarian some lamb? If you remember nothing else, you remember her.

But it is a truth universally acknowledged that every worldwide monster smash hit must be in want of a sequel, and in 2016 Ms Vardalos delivered “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2,” in which it was discovered that her parents (played by Lainie Kazan and Michael Constantine) were not married after all. And that was successful enough that here we go again, with “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3,” this time set in the motherland, but unfortunately held captive by the law of diminishing returns. 

Toula and her brother Nick (Louis Mandylor, doing some heroic physical comedy) have been invited to their late father’s home village back in Greece for a reunion of all its former residents. They have a photograph of their father as a boy with his three childhood best friends, and Toula is insistent that they must track down these friends to give them her father’s journals. 

On arrival in the village, they discover it is nearly abandoned, with the residents nearly only Victory the mayor (Melina Kotselou), old-lady-with-stick Alexandra (Anthi Andreopoulou), her son Peter (Alexis Georgoulis), his son Christos (Giannia Vasilottis) and Christos’ secret finance Qamar (Stephanie Nur), of whom Peter and Alexandra disapprove as marriage material because she is a Syrian refugee and not Greek. What, oh what, might be the Americans be able to arrange?

If you think this sounds like a mashup of “Mamma Mia!” (woman uses a parent’s scrapbook to bring three men to a Greek village where the spring has run dry) with “Under the Tuscan Sun,” (American abroad hosts a wedding for an immigrant-local couple to shame the local racists) you would be 100% correct. There’s not an original idea in Ms Vardalos’ pretty head here, and it’s just a shame that in is her directorial debut she didn’t even have the courage to jettison the light comedy for the social commentary on the tip of her tongue. It’s especially strange since the impolite treatment towards Qamar contrasts oddly sharply with that of Victory, a specifically genderqueer character who, in the wedding scene, is shown flitting back and forth between the male and female sides of the dancefloor, without anyone batting an eye. The mix of old stereotypes and modern openmindedness make for an awkward clash, especially since Ms Vardalos has the audacity to show the Americans as being above all that.

Ms. Kotselou’s performance is the only interesting thing here, which is otherwise just another comedy about Americans behaving badly abroad. But not even a good one; the shopping sequence in which Toula and Voula end up doing so many shots Toula passes out in a butcher’s just kind of fades out. Even the sequence where Toula’s college-age daughter Paris (Elena Kampouris) goes to a nude beach doesn’t land. Of course, with Ms Martin’s comedic genius on display here this almost doesn’t matter, and she’s even given a line early on to announce she’s everyone’s favourite. In this world there’s no headache in this movie that a little teamwork and motivational chats can’t solve, and there’s no prejudice that can’t be dispelled with a talking-to and a hug. There’s nothing wrong with “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3,” but like many twenty-year-old relationships, the flaws are too obvious to ignore.