Review of My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 (2016) by Mike I — 25 Mar 2016

Holy shit, was this movie awful. At least the first movie had a story. This movie seemed like it was pieced together from leftover scripts from when Nia Valdaros tried her hand at sitcom writing with My Big Fat Greek Life (blink your eyes and you would have missed it).

The movie suffers from sequalitis, meaning it puts the main character back at Point A of the original movie through contrivance, so whatever growth she had at the end of the previous movie was just lost. The same beats are hit in the sequel as the original. There are numerous callbacks (this movie starts with Toula, Vardalos's character, in the car with her dad as they drive Toula's daughter to school. . . he even calls his granddaughter old like he called Toula old in the original). But it also has new problems, like a muddled message about family, subplots and characters that go no where, and just a feeling like this was just a cash in before Michael Constantine and Lainie Kazan get any older and can't act anymore.

There were some good performances. Michael Constantine plays my dad well, even saying inappropriate things at the right moments. John Corbett plays the long suffering Ian who has no backbone but goes native and accepts the Borg nanoprobes that turn him Greek, but he's not phoning it in. Mark Margolis is pretty good, considering the shit script he's given (seriously, the man was awesome in "Scarface" and when he played Jimmy on The Equalizer). But then you have Elena Kampouris, the daughter, who looks like a live action version of Winona Ryder's character from the "Beetlejuice" cartoon, always in shock, and always looking like she's on the verge of screaming.

But my real ire goes to Nia Vardalos, the Tyler Perry of Greek people, who just plays up broad Greek stereotypes to get a larf. At least Tyler Perry has an artistic vision, lowest common denominator as it is. Vardalos is like her character, trying to please too many people (her core Greek audience, her producers, etc.) but doesn't have anything of her own to bring to the table. Jolie says her character was like the eye of the hurricane in this movie, and like the eye of a storm, nothing happens there.

The only really redeeming thing in this movie is the Greek cover version of Billy Idol's "White Wedding," complete with bouzouki instead of electric guitar! If you like the original, skip this. If you hated the original and like a train wreck, get it from the library for free.