1 of 5 | Toula (Nia Vardalos) and Ian (John Corbett) visit Greece. Photo courtesy of Focus Features.
LOS ANGELES, Sept. 7 (UPI) -- If there is an audience that watches movies without conflict, "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3" is a comfort. The sequel, which hits theaters on Friday, is as inoffensive as can be. After a photo montage of the first two films, Toula (Nia Vardalos) tells the audience about the Portokalos family. Tula's father, Gus, died, as did Michael Constantine, the actor who played her, in 2021.
Gus's wife, Maria (Lainie Kazan), has memory problems, although she tries to pretend she is fine. Toula takes her husband Ian (John Corbett), her daughter Paris (Elena Kampouris), her brother Nick (Louis Mandylor) and her aunt Vola (Andrea Martin) to Greece for a family reunion.
The Portokalos family hopes to give Gus' diary to childhood friends, but when the family arrives in the town of Vrisi, they discover that they are the only guests. None of his relatives came.
Vrisi introduces several new characters, including Mayor Dil (Melina Kotelu), Gus' older sister Alexandra (Atti Andrepoulou), his son Christos (Yiannis Votoutos), and his assistant Kamar (Stephanie Nour), a Syrian refugee.
To his credit, writer-director Vardalos pays equal attention to the extended sequences. This is not a car that Tula can build alone.
Vardalos conveyed the message tactfully so that nothing would happen in the spread of their love. Every time there is a conflict, the participants literally make up for it in the next scene.
Meeting people from Gus' past leads to complicated relationships, but the film quickly shows that everyone fully accepts any new information they learn. Finding the rest of the guests to meet is a problem, but he solves it by giving Ian a list of their locations.
The only unresolved conflict is Mary's worst case. So in the movie she is in the back of the Chicago house and he only sees her once during a video chat. Tula and Nick discuss it again.
Comedy still needs conflict to fuel the humor. You have to think that the farm animals are very funny, because Vardalos cuts a chicken and a goat at least five times.
Recreating Vindex's jokes from the first film was also great. Nick only uses Windex once after the movie, including a shot of Constantine cleaning the bottle.
The entire series is full of cute scenes, but not necessarily funny ones. The running order seems “moderate.” The most dangerous thing in the third movie is the yogurt enema.
So, a mule boy with a toilet seat is cute, Nick wiping himself at the breakfast table is disgusting, and a man in Greece finally put an end to his family's stubbornness about everyone's Greek origin.
The new characters are cute, but it's nice to see them in the same story. Likewise, it would have been nice to see existing characters face challenges that take 90 minutes to solve.
Many sitcoms use very subtle scripts to explain the team's dates and vacations abroad. Adam Sandler is the king of these types of events, but he usually manages to do something to justify his trip. Friends on vacation , even more so.
The cast seems to be having fun in Greece, but there's not much to do there. Unfortunately, even the best independent film of all time can fall victim to a mediocre sequel.
Fred Topple, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012, and a member of the Critics' Choice Association since 2023. Learn more about his career in entertainment.
