My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 (2016)

The Portokalos clan returns for a second helping, and the kitchen has not changed its recipes. Kirk Jones directs a film that treats its own cultural specificity as a comfortable pair of slippers, which is to say the Greek-American ensemble is so thoroughly the point that it barely registers as a statement. There is no thesis here, no argument about who deserves to be on screen. The family simply is, loud and enormous and fond of lamb, and the film asks nothing of us beyond tolerance for a running gag about Windex. A subplot does hand Angelo a romantic partner named Patrick, and Nick spends a stretch of the runtime urging him toward the closet door, which the film opens with a shrug and a laugh track's worth of good cheer. It is inclusion by sitcom arithmetic, sincere and weightless in equal measure.

The women of the household get their moments. Maria declines to remarry without a proper proposal, and Paris schemes her way toward a college far from the smothering embrace of her relatives. These are the beats of a domestic comedy, not a manifesto, and the film has no interest in pressing them further. Gus believes he descends from Alexander the Great, a joke that stays a joke. The recession shuttered the travel agency and the dry cleaners, a plot convenience that never once glances toward an economic argument. Nobody lectures. Nobody converts. The camera lingers on spanakopita and cousinly chaos, and the moral universe remains as flat and warm as a wedding reception hall.

What we have, then, is a sequel that coasts on goodwill and delivers diminishing returns, reviewed unkindly in its day and embraced by audiences anyway. It is harmless, occasionally charming, and utterly without ambition beyond the reunion. For those keeping score on the culture, this is a film that arrived in 2016 and chose to behave as though it had never heard of the decade. There is something almost admirable in that refusal.