My big fat greek wedding 2: Eat, stalk and love family

Cast: Nia Vardalos, John Corbett, Michael Constantine, Lainie Kazan

Rated: 5.5/10

They have aged. They have become crazier. And they eat, love and prey  well, in a big, fat way. And, of course, the family thing is like that air bag that bloats on impact to save you from crisis but asphyxiates, nevertheless.

If My Big Fat Greek Wedding original was an endearing,hatke entry all those years ago, the sequel is equally engaging, though not more. The characters are more or less the same, though the wedding is not really the central character of this heavy duty family film.

A big family, extended one, lives in houses one after the other, virtually colonising a residential lane in uptown Chicago. There’s a delightful grandfather who is obsessed about being Alexander The Great’s direct descendant, there are children who are as Greek as the salad they do down there, the ladies are of all Greek hues  loud, cooking wonders and hair stylists and the men are, well, burly brothers, sons and fathers with more muscle in their biceps than grey in their heads.

Together, they weave an engaging tale of a couple of 50 years, with grandsons and grand-daughters bustling in the background, discovering that they are not married. So there’s a wedding and the rigmarole emanating from this very Greek event management.

Sub-plots, like romance between a husband and wife being felled by daily chores, brothers being estranged, a teenage daughter wanting to go away from all this family suffocation, aunts and uncles with their distinct but delightful eccentricities, a super cool great grand mom, and lots of children all doing their stuff in a family-run restaurant, dot this languorous family drama with endearing typicality.

You kind of get woven into the familial tapestry and admit that when it is about family, the Greeks can give the Indians a run for their money. This engaging movie does too. 

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 15 May, 2016