Meet Jo Koy. Described in his personal website’s bio section as “one of today’s premiere [sic] standup comics,” his best-known screen work may be his 140-plus appearances on the late-night talkshow Chelsea Lately. Despite a seemingly low-ish profile, he is now starring in the wide-release studio vehicle Easter Sunday, the golden-ticket gig daydreamed about by all joke-tellers. This is because Koy’s site wasn’t exaggerating his onstage success: he has sold out stadium shows months in advance across America, still without making much of a dent in the cultural mainstream. Like Sebastian Maniscalco – or in a more general sense, Yellowstone and The Big Bang Theory – he really is immensely popular, just not with the tastemaker class of media consumer acting as arbiters of what’s current and relevant.
The challenge of carrying a whole movie, put to an actor whose last credit was a bit part as Vladimir Lenin in 2019’s possibly nonexistent Anastasia: Once Upon a Time, goes a way toward explaining the overall vibe that this substandard product shouldn’t have passed Universal’s quality control. He appears visibly uncomfortable as alter ego Jo Valencia, grinning with his full count of blindingly white teeth every few seconds as if to reassure us that everything’s all right and we’re all having a good time, like a parent trying to calm a shrieking infant in an airport. And yet he’s right at home in a film that never rises past his level, meeting him on the low bar he’s set for himself and eventually beckoning him downward toward intriguing, unexpected forms of badness. What begins as a broad comedy pursuing the workable angle of a My Big Fat Filipino Easter, its cardinal sin topping out at mere corniness, slowly mutates into something more confused, incompetent and arrogant.
