The career of actor and writer Nia Vardalos, post her 2001 smash hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding, has provided proof (or something like it) that lightning won't strike twice, no matter how badly one wishes it would. And so she returns to the site of the first strike, wishing for another storm of creative inspiration, or perhaps merely of those fortuitous circumstances that engendered the first film's surprise success. Lightning both hits and misses My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, which, nostalgia aside, truly isn't any worse a film than its predecessor... until it truly is. And if it mostly amounts to that one same joke repeated over until the credits roll, what's new? Actually, that part I can answer: what's new is this film's sentimental subplot, a focus on family drama further removed from the titular wedding that is the source of most of the comedy than it is from the sappiest of daytime soap operas. Every time Greek Wedding 2 hands itself over to tired scenes of spousal bonding or half-cooked teenage angst, we're served with a sorry reminder of why Vardalos was ever driven to do this film - she had no other choice. Wishing for a second lightning strike was about as promising as her career had become; luckily, that one same joke that sustained the first film is no less effective now than it was then. Zero points for originality, but Greek Wedding 2 is funny in such an affable, unpretentious way that you almost warm to its cosy familiarity, to the expected emotional beats, to the punchlines you can spot several minutes off. As creative inspiration goes, this barely even registers on the scale, but the important thing is that it hardly needs to.
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