My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2
Paris Portokalos (Elena Kampouris: American Odyssey) longs to escape her family. Her mother, Toula (Nia Vardalos: Star vs. The Forces of Evil), is clingy and desperate, her grandfather pressures her to get married and make babies at 17 and the rest of them are loud and obnoxious. Paris hopes to flee to college far, far away. Her mother counters by pressuring her daughter to stay close to home.
Toula smothers her daughter because that’s how she’s learned to act by the family she never escaped. Though she married an outsider, Ian (John Corbett: Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll), Toula is deeply ensconced in Portokalos life. She is a caregiver for her aging father, a stalker of her daughter and the family fixer of problems. It’s a great arrangement for the family, but Toula is exhausted and neglectful of her husband.
When grandparents Gus and Maria (Michael Constantine and Lainie Kazan) discover that, due to a technicality, they were never married, the family assumes the duo will head down the aisle to rectify the error. Gus is willing, but after 50 years of subservience to the domineering Portokalos patriarch, Maria isn’t so sure.
The family tells Toula to fix it.
A sequel to the family-friendly original, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 is a meander with sparse laughs and a thin plot. Vardalos, who wrote the original and the sequel, draws on her family experiences. For this installment, she brings back all the old jokes, from the patriarch’s obsession with Windex to the white neighbors who think the Greeks are creepy and weird.
Disaster is averted by winning performances. Andrea Martin (Difficult People) and Kazan both know how to sell hokey humor. They make a running gag about neck pulling workable and manage to make their overbearing personalities endearing.
Vardalos doesn’t fare so well. The point of the first film was Toula’s finding her voice and asserting herself. She hasn’t.
And this sequel isn’t My Big Fat Greek Wedding.