“Give me a word, any word,” Michael Constantine’s Gus Portokalos implored to anyone who would listen in 2002’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding, “and I’ll show you how the root of that word is Greek.” The old man’s words recur early on in My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3, spoken not by the Portokalos patriarch (Constantine himself died in 2021), but by his grieving daughter, Toula (Nia Vardalos), reminding her own daughter, Paris (Elena Kampouris), of Gus’s grinning legacy and the gaping hole he’s left behind.
Toula is doing her father’s voice and smiling when she delivers that tribute, but there are tears in her eyes too. The laughs here, for both characters and audiences, tend to echo through the gauze of nostalgia, making the film an unexpectedly moving entry in the franchise, if not an uproariously funny one. It’s certainly the most successful sequel, sharper than either 2016’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 or the short-lived CBS show My Big Fat Greek Life. That may be because Vardalos also directs here, taking full leadership in steering the ship back to port.
When My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 begins, the family has become “scattered” since Gus’s death. Even family dinners are a thing of the past. Toula is taking the clan back to Greece for a reunion in order to honor her father’s last wish: to deliver his journal to three childhood friends with whom he had lost touch since emigrating to Chicago decades earlier. Paris, meanwhile, is stressed about her disastrous freshman year at NYU, and to make matters worse, Toula’s aunts Voula (Andrea Martin) and Frieda (Maria Vacratsis) have schemingly brought along Aristotle (Elias Kacavas), a nice Greek boy whom Paris happens to have ghosted after their first date.
“I will be your favorite,” Voula announces at one point in the film to a distant cousin she’s just met, and it’s also a reminder to the audience about how much Martin holds together this franchise’s comedic recipe with Voula’s madcap logic and naughty charm. “Deciding to be friends is for when you find out that you’re dating your cousin,” Voula exasperatedly remonstrates Aristotle when he tells her that his flirtation with Paris isn’t going anywhere.
Vardalos also challenges some of her longtime co-stars, especially Louis Mandylor as Toula’s chaotic brother Nick, to deepen their characterizations, setting up scenes that are affecting not only in their immediate tenderness, but in the evolution from the straightforward silliness that came before. No such demands are made of Gia Carides and Joey Fatone as Toula’s cousins Nikki and Anthony: Vardalos gives the pair ample space to scene-steal hammily through a couple of island-hopping montages as they quest for Gus’s lost friends.
The original My Big Fat Greek Wedding all but perfected the art of the rom-com montage, as in the sequences in which Gus and Maria invite a cavalcade of increasingly unsuitable suitors over for dinner with interspersed shots of Toula and John Corbett’s Ian getting hot and heavy on their secret dates. Vardalos whips up some similarly crescendoing montages for this film, including one that features a series of Greek shop owners serving shot after shot to a lightweight Toula. Even if her comic pacing behind the camera isn’t quite as precise as Joel Zwick’s work on the first film (some slow-motion parody moments go on a bit beyond their sell-by date), Vardalos captures most of the rhythms that made the original so charming.
Vardalos also doesn’t stint on the Greek landscapes and seascapes. Much of My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 luxuriates in the searing blue of the Ionian Sea and the lush forests of the Greek island of Corfu. The franchise’s sudden embrace of the natural world accompanies a slower, sometimes contemplative, pace, as if the camera is taking the characters’ cue to soak in the world around them on this quasi-spiritual return to roots. There’s a pastoral strangeness, for example, to Ian’s newfound friendship with a priest who lives in a cabin by the sea.
The film’s best, most quietly devastating scenes involve Maria (Lainie Kazan), Toula’s mother, who’s not joining the family overseas. She has Alzheimer’s now, and her children’s pleasure with her customary wryness intermixes with sorrow at her fleeting lucidity. It’s easy to understand Toula’s obsessive need to find Gus’s friends in the midst of her mother’s decline. In that context, accessing their keen memories of her father’s youth becomes all the more significant.
And if My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 is a film in which memory—how we preserve it and what we do to honor it—is key, Vardalos plays on our own memories throughout, even starting with a title credits sequence that features stills from scenes from the first film. For devotees of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, then, this will be a surprisingly emotional trip home.
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