‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3′ review: Get them to the Greek Islands

It has been 32 years since a Greek-Canadian native of Winnipeg named Nia Vardalos worked for Second City in Chicago. It has been 26 years since Vardalos scored in the 99-seat Los Angeles theater circuit with “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” a 45-minute solo stage version of a screenplay Vardalos couldn’t sell to the movies. Yet.

Then Rita Wilson saw the show and told her husband (Tom Hanks) about it, and they got the movie made with HBO financing and their own production company. On a modest $5 million budget, the 2002 picture grossed almost 75 times that, worldwide. Money-wise, it’s still the biggest romantic comedy in the film history. “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2,” which came out in 2016, got reamed by the critics but did well enough to lead to “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3,” written, starring and directed by Vardalos in her second-ever feature behind the camera. (”I Hate Valentine’s Day” was the first.)

So how is the new one? Well, I’d love to say it’s full of surprises, but we both know that can’t possibly be the case. This one’s a little easier to take than “Greek Wedding 2,” though, even if it makes the first movie look like a low-key exercise in emotional and comic neorealism. The material, and the direction, add up to one thing; the people on the screen are another — a considerably better thing.

Premise? Another wedding. Plus a family reunion in the Portokalos clan’s Greek island village back home. This is where the late Gus wanted the family to gather after his passing. (Michael Constantine, who played the beguiling, Windex-slinging ringer from the first two films, died in 2021.) Toula (Vardalos) is on a mission to find her father’s three oldest friends, the ones in a treasured old photograph of four boys, smiling, beckoning.

That’s one plot hook, as Toula’s fractious relatives bang around the old island village (population: six), where the mayor (Melina Kotselou, a plus) hopes to restore the village to a semblance of life. The wedding this time is half-Greek, half-Syrian, which means there are tradition-bound village elders to appease. With a dementia-challenged mother (Lainie Kazan) at home in Chicago, Toula and company feel the weight of time passing. Well, now and then. The bread and butter here, as in “Greek Wedding”s past, is in such lines as: “I’m cooking! Wear your eating pants!” Or this, from the invaluable Andrea Martin’s Aunt Voula, who dismisses her niece’s unwillingness to discuss her romantic complications with a blunt reminder of the Greek way: Find a way to argue it out, “using threats and guilt.”

John Corbett returns as the flagrantly non-Greek husband, Ian. Like Toula, he exists largely in reaction shots here, his eyes widened by the sights and sounds everywhere. Of course the scenery’s dandy. But the way “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3″ has been staged, filmed and edited, every new scene and each exchange has a way of being undermined by the filmmaking choices.

Example: The family, just arrived at the Athens airport, waits for their rental car to enter the frame. Punchline: It’s a rickety old farmer’s truck. There’s really only one way to handle that bit. Let the truck roll into the frame, and keep the camera still. You don’t need three pushy, intrusive cuts across seven seconds of screen time to punch up a joke that size. But that’s what happens here. Director Vardalos, the keeper of her half-billion-dollar franchise, mistakes antsiness for energy, cutting constantly, messing up the rhythms. Who needs the punctuation when you have pros and newcomers alike working the full range of the subtlety-to-shamelessness spectrum?

“My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3″ — 2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for suggestive material and some nudity)

Running time: 1:31

How to watch: Premieres in theaters Sept. 7.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @phillipstribune