According to a list published by The Hollywood Reporter in 2013, the three highest-grossing independent movies of all time are Mel Gibson’s pious snuff film, Danny Boyle’s joyous Oscar darling and Nia Vardalos’ wacky sitcom pilot. Regular churchgoers and golden statuettes buoyed the respective box-office fortunes of The Passion of the Christ and Slumdog Millionaire. But My Big Fat Greek Wedding lacked a massive core demographic and wasn’t beloved by critics. How did a middling romantic comedy find an audience to surpass the success of such indie touchstones as The Blair Witch Project, Pulp Fiction and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? With a corpulent ethnic twist, of course.
Written by Vardalos, who also played the film’s dowdy protagonist Toula, My Big Fat Greek Wedding was, at the very least, an accurate caricature of Greek-American culture (though she and the film are both Canadian). As the child of Greek-Canadian parents, I recognized most of Vardalos’ comedic details, some of which were so specific they could’ve been transcribed from my childhood. I even dragged my extended family to see My Big Fat Greek Wedding on the big screen, more than once, back in 2002. At the time, we reveled in its funhouse-mirror reflection of ourselves, and merely tolerated the rest. One can only assume non-Greeks responded to the movie’s goofy exoticism rather than its wan rom-com tropes. Whatever the reason, thanks to word of mouth, the film remained in theaters for almost a year, a remarkable feat.
Fourteen years later, the crazy Greek schtick has long lost its novelty. And My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 has little more to offer than the same warmed-over running gags. Its plot, and I use that term generously, centers on Toula and her husband Ian (a blank-eyed John Corbett) in the throes of a minor domestic crisis. Their teenage daughter Paris (Elena Kampouris) wants nothing to do with them or her overbearing grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. In that sense, she’s the audience’s surrogate. We share her pain. You see, Toula and the larger Portokalos clan have no lives of their own. Their many small businesses can, apparently, operate themselves as Paris’ family gatecrashes a high school event and her freshman dorm to wreak non-hilarity. And why shouldn’t they drop everything to insert themselves into the minutiae of an adolescent’s life? They are, after all, buffoonish Greeks. Opa!
As for the movie’s iterative title, there’s a subplot about Toula’s parents (again played by Lainie Kazan and Michael Constantine), who aren’t technically married thanks to an absurd plot complication. So, we’re forced to endure another big fat you-know-what, seemingly for Vardalos to make good on her contract with the studio. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 flaunts its tackiness and mawkishness, as if to anticipate criticism. This gambit not only fails, it squanders whatever goodwill a viewer might have for its slapdash narrative and leaden joviality.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding worked as well as it did because Nia Vardalos seasoned a simple love story with sprinklings of idiosyncrasy. Her sequel is a fistful of Greek spices piled atop a sad wedge of spanakopita. After a bite, you begin to wonder if the problem is its poor execution or the misguided decision to prepare a second dish in the first place.