92 min | PG-13 | September 8, 2023 | Focus Features
Toula and the Portokalos clan haul their loud, loving chaos back to Greece for a family reunion in her late father’s village. Nia Vardalos writes, directs, and stars in a threequel that mistakes scenery for jokes. The wedding is in the title, but the movie forgot to pack everything else.
Toula Portokalos and her family fly to Greece for a reunion in her late father’s ancestral village. Nia Vardalos writes, directs, and stars in the third installment of a franchise that ran out of jokes after the first one. The film wants to be a warm tribute to family, heritage, and the immigrant parents who built a life in Chicago. It mostly functions as a travelogue with a wedding bolted onto the end. The plot exists to move the cast from one sunlit Greek vista to the next. The result is a movie about loss that refuses to slow down long enough to feel anything.
Vardalos plays Toula as a woman stretched between her aging mother and her own grown daughter. She delivers the lines with the same wide-eyed exasperation she has used for twenty years, and the routine has worn thin. John Corbett plays Ian Miller as a supportive husband with almost nothing to do. He stands at the edge of frames and smiles. Elena Kampouris plays Paris Miller, the daughter, with a flatness the script never bothers to fill in. Andrea Martin gets the only real laughs as Aunt Voula because she commits to the absurdity while everyone else coasts.
Vardalos directs the film like a vacation slideshow. The camera lingers on whitewashed villages and blue water as if the scenery can substitute for comedy. Her script recycles the structure of the original almost beat for beat. The big loud family arrives somewhere, clashes with the locals, and reconciles over food. The editing rushes through every emotional moment to reach the next gag, so the absence of the family patriarch lands with no weight. The score swells on cue and tells the audience exactly when to feel warm.
This is a film built on affection for characters who stopped being characters two movies ago. Vardalos clearly loves this family and wants to honor the parents who anchored the series. Good intentions do not generate laughs, and warmth is not the same as humor. The franchise once found comedy in the specific friction between an old-world family and an American outsider. That friction is gone, and what remains is a cast going through the motions in a beautiful country. The movie ends with a wedding because the title demands one, not because the story earns it.