My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 [PG]

Years after her big, fat, Greek wedding, Toula’s life has come to a bit of a halt. Her daughter, Paris, has hit her teens and is slowly pulling away, she’s back at helping out at the family restaurant, she seems to be constantly taking care of her parents, and her love life has hit a wall. But the dramas only escalate when Costa discovers that he and Maria have not technically been married these fifty years and it suddenly falls to Toula and the rest of the family to put on another big, fat, Greek wedding. 

It’s the truth universally known that the sequel is never going to be as good as the original and in this respect My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 does not disappoint. Whilst the general feel-good vibe of the movie is still there in spades more or less, from a narrative and cinematic point of view it leaves a bit to be desired and you can really take or leave it. Having said that, I took it and I will still be adding this the library when it’s released on DVD. 

I think where this movie really fell down was in the story. Obviously the writers still need the movie to be about Toula and so we have this sort of revert back to the past when she wasn’t putting effort into her appearance and was kind of miserable and “frump girl”, which does kind of work I guess, but for whatever reason I found myself not caring for Toula at all. Unlike the first movie, you weren’t really on the Toula bandwagon with this one. She kind of gets stretched in all these different directions and her character sort of becomes lost and strained. As Bilbo Baggins would say, she was like “butter scraped over too much bread”. 

The ‘drama’ with her daughter was a story not so heartily invested in; although a bit clichéd, it still could have worked if only the writers weren’t so tied down by the censure of having to have a film centre around a big, fat, Greek wedding. 

Bridget Jones’ parents got married again with a good level of narrative success, whereas Maria and Costa’s Kath and Kel-esque story of marital strife was a bit weak to carry the entire film, which I felt is what it sort of ended up doing. All the best moments are in conjunction with the wedding plans and the relationship blah blah blah, and whilst they do provide the film with its signature and looked-for comedy to various degrees of success, it’s still a weak structure to build a bridge on. 

Negatives aside, all our favourite characters are back with a nice little bit of development on ones who we didn’t get to know too much about in the first movie: keep an eye out on Angelo and his story, and the relationships between supporting characters and mains are very lovely to watch. Without a doubt the stars of the show are still Yaya and Voula, they’re just beautiful to watch and whenever they’re on screen the scene is all about them. 

Starring Nia Vardalos, Michael Corbett, Andrea Martin, Gia Carides, Michael Constantine, Lainie Kazan, Joey Fatone, Elena Kampouris, Bess Meisler, Louis Mandylor, Alex Wolff, Ian Gomez, and Jayne Eastwood, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 is a fun movie filled with a lot of the same jokes, ‘drama’, and romance. If you liked the first one then you will like this one too though maybe just not as much.