In the years following the runaway success of her 2002 indie smash My Big Fat Greek Wedding, its star and screenwriter, Nia Vardalos, spent a lot of time circling that material without quite committing to revisiting it in the cinema. She reunited with her on-screen husband John Corbett to play a new character in her directorial debut I Hate Valentine’s Day; revisited Greek culture for the unrelated romcom My Life in Ruins; and did a single season of My Big Fat Greek Life, a sitcom sequel to the original movie. Technically, the movie’s big-screen run outlasted its sitcom follow-up: the film’s last weekend in theaters, a full year after its original release, coincided with the airing of the show’s final episode.
Strange that the show made such a quick exit, because it’s the three-camera sitcom format that should fit the My Big Fat Greek Wedding sensibility perfectly; the movie was already essentially a protracted sitcom pilot, with no short supply of zany characters vying for that “and” credit. Then again, most TV comedies are a lot plottier than My Big Fat Greek Wedding – or either of the sequels Vardalos eventually did make, including the new My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3. That the films make an attempt to move at the ambling, uneven, non-clockwork pace of real life is part of their charm. The elements that seem most ill-advised – the lack of story beyond “family gets older”, the long gaps between the sequels that facilitate that getting older – are really their secret strengths.
Unfortunately, they sometimes remain secrets to the film-makers, too. Like its predecessor, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 has a vast river of sadness running beneath its kooky surface, and Vardalos (who wrote and directed this installment) doesn’t seem to know how, or whether, to tap into it. Rather than following up on the previous movie’s mystifying hint that empty-nesters Toula Portokalos (Vardalos) and her non-Greek husband Ian (Corbett) might adopt a baby, Greek Wedding 3 pivots unexpectedly in step with real life. Michael Constantine, the actor who played the Portokalos patriarch, Gus, died in 2021, so the sequel picks up in the aftermath of this loss, its catch-up credits unconvincingly splitting the difference between family photos and publicity stills from the previous films.
Gus’s dying wish was for Toula to take his journal, chronicling his life in America, to his old friends back in Greece. So Toula, Ian, their college-aged daughter Paris (Elena Kampouris), Toula’s brother Nick (Louis Mandylor), Aunt Voula (Andrea Martin) and Aunt Frieda (Maria Vacratsis) all embark on a Greek vacation to attend a big family reunion and find Gus’s old pals. It turns out that the reunion isn’t much of one; Toula’s extremely distant cousin Victory (Melina Kotselou), the self-elected mayor of a remote Greek island, concocted the event in a desperate attempt to draw people back to the near-deserted town. Toula persists anyway, wandering around in search of her father’s friends and trying her best not to meddle in her daughter’s affairs. Meanwhile, Paris deals with the unexpected return of an old boyfriend, Nick overuses a personal grooming device, the family meets a long-lost relative, and Ian, as ever, is also there.
The family matriarch, Maria (Lainie Kazan), however, is not. She stays home because she’s not really up for the trip, though the movie is cagey about what stage of dementia she’s reached. Vardalos obviously wants to write something about the bittersweet middle-age phenomenon of watching longtime heads of the family being forced by time to abdicate their roles, either suddenly (as with Gus) or gradually (as with Maria). It’s emotionally potent and, like much of the immigrant-family shtick from the first film, deeply relatable. It also seems to make the movie uncomfortable, as if fearful of torpedoing its feelgood rep by reminding its audience of real-life grief, causing it to repeatedly and halfheartedly wave away the specifics of Maria’s condition.
Maybe it’s not fair to expect a more confrontational My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3. But its brief, brushed-off moments of anti-levity stand out, maybe because as a director, Vardalos does not have the comic touch required to provide the escapist distraction the movie is going for. Simple comic building blocks like entrances and exits, funny montages, and sight gags slip through her fingers; the movie’s editing constantly feels a beat or two behind the action. As a performer, Vardalos still does herself a disservice by sharing scenes with Andrea Martin, a true pro who knows how to milk dopey lines and shopworn running gags for all they’re worth (even when that worth still doesn’t add up to much). Newcomer Kotselou is essentially doing a bad Saturday Night Live character, complete with overused catchphrase, but at least it gives her something to play beyond “in a Greek family”.
Ultimately, that generic togetherness is all Greek Wedding 3 has to offer – that, and yet another actual Greek wedding, this one more removed from the central characters than ever before. (Thrill to the nuptials of two new characters with a combined one personality trait!) Vardalos seems continually torn between acknowledging the fragile, fleeting nature of even the warmest and happiest families, and producing an aimless travelogue where a bunch of nice people do nothing much in particular before attending a wedding. Even her opening narration whipsaws between elation and melancholy, another surprisingly realistic touch that may actually be an accident of sloppy film-making. Regardless, the travelogue wins out in the end. This is an intergenerational chronicle as fake-looking as its digitally created family photos.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 is out in cinemas on 8 September
