My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 review: “A sequel that is very average and harmful to gender stereotypes…
Full disclosure before this review beings, I haven’t see My Big Fat Greek Wedding and have avoided watching it like the plague ever since its release in 2002. I also only agreed to watch this film under duress and as a favour to our editor-in-chief who was taking a much earned break on the day of the screening. What follows is a review from the perspective of someone who is coming to the series stone cold.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 is as generic as you’d expect and despite not having seen the first it feels very much like a lather, rinse, repeat affair. This time around the titular wedding focusses in on the older generation of the family as, thanks to a loophole, their first wedding wasn’t actually legally binding.
Given that the first film made over $650 million dollars at the box office (not bad from a budget of $5 million) its surprising that the distributors have decided to release the film against Batman Versus Superman. Maybe they’re hoping to get the Superhero widows, because women don’t like comic book movies right? This sort of stereotypical thinking fits right in with the film that really does nothing for either sex.
The female characters fit into about four boxes; the flirt, the suffocatingly overprotective mother, the gossip and the bitch. The men get even less boxes: man-child, kook and drunk. The overarching message of the film is meant to be that you can do whatever you want and your family will still love you, however, all the older generation’s stereotype ideals are upheld and no one goes against the grain. Even the rebellious teenage daughter falls into line by the end credits. There’s also an awful pre-wedding girl chat that encourages women to pretend to faint on their wedding night and let their new husband ‘do the work’ – what!?
The wedding itself takes up a very small portion of run time, the film is more of a vehicle to check in on the characters that the audiences fell for the first time round. Sadly there doesn’t seem to have been much development.
Disappointingly average and harmful to gender stereotypes, the film may go down well with fans nostalgic for the original, but stay away if you are of a more modern or progressive mindset.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, review by Kat Hughes, March 2016.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 arrives in UK cinemas on Friday 25th March.
