'My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3' review: The gang's back and Greeker than ever!

Pour yourself a shot of Ouzo and spit away the bad spirits — the Portokalos family is back! And wouldn't you know it? Somebody's getting married in writer/director/star Nia Vardalos's threequel My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3. So, who's walking down the aisle this time? And before they do, will someone use Windex inappropriately in honor of the family's late patriarch, Gus (Michael Constantine)? Will Aunt Voula (Andrea Martin) mention her teratoma during dinner yet again? These are rhetorical questions, of course, and as baba Gus would've pointed out, "rhetorical" comes from the Greek word "rhētorikē," which means "the art of oratory," and indeed, there are even more etymology jokes to come. S'all the hits.

Arriving in theaters 21 entire years after the original film charged outta nowhere and smashed box office records — it remains the highest-grossing rom-com of all time — with its simple tale of a Greek girl named Toula (Vardalos) and a not-Greek boy named Ian (John Corbett) falling in love against the wishes of her extended, extended, extended family, the third film finds our now middle-aged couple going on vacation.

Sort of. Befitting the slightly more mournful tone of this entry, Toula and Ian have both recently lost their fathers, mirroring the fact that both Constantine and Bruce Gray, who played Ian's father Rodney, have died since the second movie came out in 2016. So, the "vacation" that the couple's embarking on is really a return to Gus's homeland in Greece, where Toula plans to fulfill his dying wish by hand-delivering a journal he'd kept to his three best childhood friends.

More Mammas than you can shake a Mia at.

Credit: Focus Features

Of course, we could hardly leave the extended Portokalos clan back in Chicago — they are, after all, this franchise's bread and butter. And so along for the ride we've got Toula and Ian's college-aged daughter Paris (Elena Kampouris), who seems to be harboring some kind of secret. There's Toula's brother Nick (Louis Mandylor), who… Well, he also seems to be harboring some kind of secret. And then there are the comical aunties, Voula (Martin) and Frieda (Maria Vacratsis), who couldn't harbor a secret if either of their lives depended on it. They say every out-there thought that crosses their minds, which is why we love 'em.

But what of mama Maria (Lainie Kazan), you ask? The film's opening scene deals us another big blow of sad stuff right out of the gate, showing us that Marie now has Alzheimer's and can only sporadically recognize her family members. The fact that the script conveniently uses said Alzheimer's as an excuse to give us a quick upfront exposition dump – we're told about the trip to Greece and why they're all going there during a memory test for Maria – is maybe a little weird? And whatever real-world reasons there were that Kazan couldn't be a bigger part of the film and come along on the trip, that will be just the first bout with awkwardness that My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 runs into. There will be more. As sure as roosters will crow the clock hours, awkwardness will come a'crowing.

This is especially true for Paris, who seems only a hair less constantly mortified by her family's antics than she did in the second movie. Her match-making aunties have hatched a diabolical plot to keep the Greek baby train rolling, bringing along on the trip an adorable boy named Aristotle (Elias Kacavas) that Paris briefly dated during college, all under the guise of him being Voula's "assistant." And if you have to ask if he's Greek… Did you see that his name is Aristotle? We haven't made it to the third entry of this franchise expecting subtlety.

There's no place like Greece, there's no place like Greece…

Credit: Focus Features

Like the Acropolis they speed by after leaving the airport, and the donkey-riding farmer we then see using an iPad, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 makes it clear quickly that this isn't going to be the genial "travelogue across old-timey paradise" movie that we might have come into it expecting. This isn't an ABBA musical of idyllic locations and sun-kissed tans. And that's an aim that fits squarely in Vardalos's long-term vision for this series, for as broad as her humor has always played, her characters have managed to bridge stereotype with truth. You could see the love for and the reality of them under the gags — that sense of authenticity was a huge part of what carried the first movie to such lofty cross-cultural heights in 2002.

And so the Greece that My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 takes us to ends up being a bit less of a paradise than it is a ghost town. Like Gus did decades earlier, most everyone's moved away; his hometown village has a grand total of six people residing in it when the Portokalos clan come calling. The wells have dried up. And there are lines of Syrian refugees lining the streets, looking for work and for bread, ruffling some feathers in the process. (As one character points out, "xenophobia" is a Greek word too.)

Did I expect My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 to tackle the European refugee crisis amid all of its lighthearted shenanigans? I can say I most thoroughly did not. And that's to the film's benefit; without getting into spoilers for this film's surprise matrimonial plot, every wedding in this franchise has had a bit of a politicized sting to it, from Toula's original rejection of her family's cloistered worldview to Maria's speech in the second film that beat Barbie to the feminist punch on the unfair expectations placed on women. Finding ways to snip through conservative notions and find a broader, more liberal and accepting world through those knots is very obviously near and dear to Vardalos's heart, and bless her for it.

Mo family, mo problems.

Credit: Focus Features

The problem is that for all of its big talk about secrets and surprises, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 keeps substituting breadth for weigh. Plots and reveals keep flying at the screen, but the film doesn't give them room to breathe or feel terribly consequential. The "secret" that Paris is harboring is so tepid it doesn’t even warrant an Aunt Voula eye-roll (for a thrilling quick second the movie makes us think her character might be queer, but then backs off just as fast). And the love story at its heart is a Cliffs Notes version of the first movie transposed. It's entirely drama-free, because there are 20 other things simultaneously happening, and we hardly know half of these people.

And the people we do know have mostly stiffened into bits by now. Andrea Martin is a legend and an icon, and she wrings every drop of humor from every line she's tasked with, but by the time this film has her detailing her third fresh medical anomaly, the gag's beyond her. It's like the tenth SNL skit for a beloved character whose punchline has finally curdled into cringe.

But this Bigger, Fatter, Greeker Wedding ain't all something blue.

Credit: Focus Features

There are exceptions – feeling like a sweet call-back to the first film especially, all of the stuff between Toula and Nick is super sweet and touching, and the "secret" that he's brought to Greece with him ends up being the film's most genuinely moving. Admittedly, it slides in from almost out of nowhere, but then that's par for the course for a movie where John Corbett's only role is to pop up every so often and ask, "Shouldn't we be enjoying ourselves just a little?" Yes, John! Yes, you should.

Which brings us to the film's effervescent highlight: a side quest involving cousins Nikki (Gia Carides) and Angelo (Joey Fatone) trying to track down Gus's childhood friends that could've been an hour longer. These scenes benefit from having a solid throughline and end-point, something which the rest of this aimless outing keeps losing sight of amid all its telescoping side plots and played-out bits. But Carides and Fatone have killer chemistry, and their characters get to be lively and brash in ways every other depressive character here lacks. It's not everybody else's fault that the cousins are having the time of their lives while they mope around listlessly, but it's not ours in the audience either that we kinda end up wishing we were traveling with Nikki and Angelo the whole time instead.

So it's definitely the law of diminishing returns for the My Big Fat Greek Wedding franchise; it's safe to say most everyone's ranking will probably go in numerical order with this here third volume stacked roundly in last place. Yet if you have any fondness for these characters, it's not ninety minutes totally lost, especially in this, our year of 2023, there’s something wonderful about this family of not-supers warranting an ongoing big-screen series of films. It's the cinematic equivalent of comfort food, like a warm blanket made of spanakopita and group hugs.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 is now in theaters.