Sequel gets bigger, fatter and more disappointing

Opa! In Nia Vardalos’s movie, “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2,” our favorite Greek family has returned to the big screen and they are the same as they were in the first movie, only bigger and fatter.

“My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2” is like eating a grapefruit. First, you have to break through the skin and take a few bites to get used to the taste. And when you finally start to like it, it squirts you in the eye.

After 14 years, Toula has returned to working in the family restaurant, helping Gus prove that he is a direct descendant of Alexander the Great and trying to cope with the fact that her Greek-American daughter, Paris, is applying to colleges across the country in order to escape Ian, who is now the overbearing principal at her high school, and the rest of her obnoxious family.

Amidst the dramatic lives of the Portokalos family members, Gus finds his marriage license and realizes that it was never signed, meaning he and Maria were never legally married. So of course another big fat Greek wedding is in the works.

The movie is one big fat compilation of Windex jokes and countless anecdotes where the grandchildren trace words back to their Greek roots that constantly squirt you in the face.

I get that it is the sequel, but it seems as if the writers all got together and thought, “Hmmm, we should take everything in the first movie and just do it again…but bigger.”

Returning characters are reintroduced and given their own individual backstories.Like the first movie, every scene that is graced with Andrea Martin’s presence is loaded with laughs, sass and unwanted sex advice. However, she is not given a line quite as memorable as her quote from the first film, “What do you mean he don’t eat no meat? That’s OK. I make lamb.”

New characters attempt to bring humor to the movie. The sexiest Greek in all of Hollywood, John Stamos, makes a cameo where all he does is grace the screen with his beauty and perfection. His character serves no real purpose in the film at all.

The Vardalos grandchildren provide light-hearted entertainment with tired reused jokes that are stolen from the first film.

This movie’s plot is like a bundt cake and Toula is the flower pot in the center, trying to fill the hole. Between Toula’s marital problems, having to cope with the fact that Paris is going to college and another wedding, this movie has no real plot.

The additional drama of Maria almost not going through with the wedding, Paris taking it upon herself to ask the boy she is crushing on to prom, a family member coming out of the closet and Gus’s estranged brother coming to America for the wedding just clutters the screenplay, making the film even harder to follow.

Vardalos gives audiences a film with recycled jokes about Greeks marrying Greeks and ends it with another big fat Greek wedding where all of the drama is resolved with a hug.

Making an equally fantastic sequel is hard and “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2” is a chaotic mess of a film in need of a serious

Windex treatment.