'My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3' Has Enough Heart and Honesty To Warrant A Trip To Greece
My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 is like seeing a familiar relative. You enjoy their company and quirks for all they have. MBFGW 3 plays all the familiar beats. There are the family members who represent everything that's Greek. Aunt Voula (Andrea Martin) is a lively, fun relative who brings life to a party. She's a regular chatterbox who's fun to be around. Nick (Louis Mandylor) is the crazy brother who's an obsessive self-groomer with little social awareness. There are more characters in Nia Vardalos' picture that brings a vibrant family to life. All of which share enough screen time with their own little moments to shine.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 could face the doom of being redundant. In some areas, it is. The entire gag of My Big Fat Greek Wedding was Toula (Nia Vardalos) introducing her family to a man who wasn't Greek. Lan (John Corbett) is Nia's finance who experiences Greek culture firsthand. He sees that Greeks think Windex solves everything, and there's a grandmother who's always trying to escape the house.
Regarding cooking, Lan is a vegetarian, so Aunt Vula proposes, "that's okay, I make lamb." The bits from the first film worked splendidly for the original picture as it was a fish out of water tale where Lan is being introduced to another culture he's unfamiliar with. Once the novelty of the first film's concept wears off, there's not much left to go on.
I did not see the second film as I already got tired of the concept of "hey, look how crazy Greeks are" when Nia Vardalos produced "My Big Fat Greek Life" on CBS—transforming a cute little narrative into a weekly sitcom, beating its joke like a dead goat with a stick. We get the gag already, so why stretch it out so far? There were red flags with MBFGreek Life when John Corbett was replaced with some other guy, and Toula's name was replaced with Nia's real name. Yet the rest of the cast remains intact. Is this a Greek family in some multiverse where Tula is Nia, and Lan is Thomas? Unlike the failed sitcom, there's a little more to Part III of the Greek Wedding trilogy than lame humor. Granted, there still are some cheap dick jokes that inhabit the picture.
After Gus Portokalos (Michael Constantine) has passed, his daughter Toula honors her father's will by returning his family journal to his three best friends in the village of Vrisi in Greece. Things don't go as planned as the three friends have departed, and the village is empty. The only one occupying the town is a grumpy older woman. The term Vrisi means faucet. The abandoned village lacks a stream of water despite being built with fountains. An empty village is common in Greek culture as there's not much to do in those towns, and the inhabitants of places like Vrisi depart for a more prosperous life in the major cities.
The story is about Toula trying to unite her entire family in a vacation to Greece that turns into a celebration of life through reunification. On the path to find the three missing friends, Toula enlists the assistance of her sister, who must go in search of the three friends who have scattered to other parts of Greece. With the help of Toula's husband, Lan, who befriends a Greek monk, they get a list of the men and their whereabouts. Nikki (Gia Carides) and Angelo (Joey Fatone) then sneak a trip to Greece and search for their lost friends.
In the meantime, a love story develops in the village between a young Serbian girl, Qamar (Stephanie Nurr), who falls in love with the grandson of the older village lady. Their union is not welcomed by either the grandmother or father of the young man because the girl is not Greek. Yet all works out, and a wedding is to be thrown for them. There's a lot of heart to My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3. The film isn't just another sequel trying to cash in on a twenty-one-year-old film. Mostly. Instead, it's a movie saying something about giving new life. By uniting the family together in Vrisi, Toula is bringing a dead village back to life. Family breeds life, and blood is thicker than water, although it's nice when you can get the faucets to work. That's not to say the movie doesn't contain some leaky pipes.
Not everything structurally works. How the characters come to produce a wedding on such a whim isn't believable. Neither is the investment in the couples to be married as they're hardly developed. There's multiple plotlines going on at once. There's the main plot where Toula is trying to find the three friends of her late father, the love story between the Greek guy and Serbian girl, and the love story between Toula's daughter Paris (Elena Kampouris) and Aristotle, a smart, handsome, yet kind of nerdy Greek boy. With so much love in the air, the Big Fat Greek balloon almost pops itself on all its converging love triangles.
If the film sounds like it gets too sentimental, it does, but for a romcom like this, that's okay. There's an honesty in the material that's unexpected. Toula's mother, Maria (Lainie Kazan), begins to develop memory loss at her old age. She still remembers who everyone is, but for how long nobody knows. The film could have shied away from the mother imminently losing her memory, and just had her smile smile for the camera. Instead, the film acknowledges that these things happen to our parents. Memory loss is something we cope with as we grow older.
Little bits like that and Vrisi being reinhabited makes My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 better than being just another sequel. It has the soul to dive further into Greek culture by traveling directly to its plot's source yet not feeling redundant. With enough laughs and heart, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 is a fitting goodbye to Michael Constantine and a new welcome to what may be a future generation to carry on the Greek Wedding legacy.
However, I could go without seeing more Greek Wedding films. Then again, what other projects does Nia Vardalos have lined up? We'll get more Greek wedding films after this one, probably involving the daughter's wedding. There's no need to ruin what's already good with a sequel, but I wouldn't be surprised if another film's deal hasn't already been discussed, only waiting for the ink to dry depending on the film's box office results.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 opens in theaters nationwide This Friday, October 8.
