Film Review - The Wedding Banquet
Images courtesy of Maslow Entertainment.
It’s criminally disappointing when a director has all of the pieces; an all star cast, promising premise, and beloved original ip, and churns out something as bland as Andrew Ahn’s The Wedding Banquet.
In Andrew Ahn’s reboot of The Wedding Banquet, we follow a quartet of characters: Angela (Kelly Marie-Tran), Lee (Lily Gladstone), Chris (Bowen Yang), and Min (Han Gi-chan). Angela and Lee live together in Angela’s inherited family home, with Chris and Min living in a subleased shed out the back. Angela and Lee are having trouble conceiving through IVF, and Korean native Min, is about to be sent back to Korea to work for his family upon the expiration of his student visa. To fix their mutual problem, they decide to get married - Min will be able to stay in the US, and in exchange he’ll pay for Angela and Lee’s expensive IVF treatments. When Min’s grandmother flies from Korea to the US to visit the newly engaged couple and organise their wedding, the audience is promised hilarious shenanigans to come.
Except… they don’t. The wedding itself is a standout highlight, but for the other hour and a half of runtime, for every situation that promises a goldmine of situational comedy, Anh instead delivers a slop of flat, interpersonal drama. Our couples, Angela and Lee, and Chris and Min, are constantly arguing, upset, and hurting each other. The film seems to assume that the audience will care about these characters by default and doesn’t do any work to spend time convincing an audience of their compatibility. By Angela and Lee’s third argument on the same subject, I started to believe that these two couples would be better off without each other. Marie-Tran and Gladstone, who are trying their damndest to deliver compelling performances, have both abandoned any sense of comedy and are instead playing their characters in a completely dramatic fashion. Both are enjoyable to watch, but I didn’t buy a real sense of chemistry between the two of them. Chris is extremely apathetic, doing and believing in almost nothing for the majority of the runtime - and when even Bowen Yang’s charisma isn’t enough to save a character, there’s a real problem in your writing.
The dialogue is extremely clunky. Character’s do unsubtle exposition dumps and say what they are thinking or feeling at any moment. Min’s grandmother (Youn Yuh-jung) blatantly says “It was hard after your parents died”, a line so unrealistic that it almost made me laugh. There's some particularly confusing editing choices; multiple scenes in the film feel like they could be ditched altogether, and it would make absolutely no impact. The standout performances come fromHan Gi-chan and Joan Chen, who seem like the only actors who paid any mind to the fact that this film is marketed as a comedy. Lily Gladstone is criminally underused here, but when she’s onscreen she shines (as always). There are a few funny jokes and the ending is very sweet, but unfortunately they can’t save this banquet from feeling like a slog.
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The Wedding Banquet is screening in cinemas now. For tickets and more info, click here.