‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3’: It’ll Do!
A gently wacky, no-stakes comedy with some moments of true craft.
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Despite the more than seven years between My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 and the latest entry, it’s as though no time has passed at all when you step inside the world of My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3. This is how it is constructed—the second entry ended with Paris (Elena Kampouris) being dropped off at college, and in this one, she’s just finished her freshman year. However, it is true that, despite a rapidly changing industry that has practically elbowed out rom-coms and mid-budget crowd pleasers entirely, we still live in a world where a sitcom-scale story with a cast of characters who wait patiently to do their bits, fade into the background, and then do their bits again can make it to the big screen. There’s something not exactly refreshing but relaxing about visiting a place where the stakes are so low that the only real conflict is protagonist Toula (Greek Wedding screenwriter and now-director Nia Vardalos) versus off-the-grid-ness, as she struggles to find the now-geriatric (and always Greek) men her now-dead father grew up with because she promised him she’d give them his journal. Edith Hamilton, Vardalos ain’t.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 is simply meant to be escapist entertainment. On that front, it succeeds more than it fails—I saw it in a full theater whose crowd consisted of both critics and non-critics, and it kind of killed? As the movie follows the mecca to Greece taken by Toula and her family, Vardalos’ dialogue can be extremely stiff (“That was epic!” her character says at one point; “You failed? We trusted you to go to NYU and you blew it!” her character’s husband, Ian, played by John Corbett, scolds Paris), but the overall tone of gentle wackiness is routinely endearing. This is the kind of movie that repeatedly—and I mean, at least five times—uses farm animals like goats and an extremely spirited rooster as segues between scenes. (“Cock-a-doodle-doo!” Hahaha!) It’s the kind of movie where Toula’s Windex-loving brother Nick (Louis Mandylor) takes an outdoor shower in the village his family is staying in, realizes too late that his only option is cold water, screams, the scream echoes through the Greek countryside, and then Vardalos cuts to a goat bleating. Cute stuff like that.