Review
Culture
Film & TV
7 min read

Two terrible travelogues in search of their storylines

Yaroslav Walker would rather get to a monastery than recommend these threequels.
A family arrive at an overnight stay, enter a room and look around uncertainly
The cast of My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 look for its storyline.
Universal Pictures.

Welcoming a baby boy to my family (pause for applause) has left my September rather busy, and I couldn’t face anything too meaty and intelligent and subtle in my viewing: I wanted some simple fare that would be both entertaining and familiar. I was, therefore, delighted to see that September was a month of ‘threequels’. I am a big fan of both My Big Fat Greek Wedding and The Equalizer; they are uncomplicated and inviting, funny and charming, doing what they do (romantic comedy/culture-clash/action/man-against-the-world) efficiently and good-naturedly… 

Their third instalments fail spectacularly. 

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 is neither charming nor funny, and it hardly has any wedding in it. The first instalment was a delightful example of a classic American movie trope: culture clash between the first and second generation immigrant communities that make up the country. Tula Portokalos falls in love with a handsome WASP, while her family want her to marry a nice Greek boy. As they prepare to marry, Nick (the fiancé) has to assimilate to the Greek way of living (and really rather likes it) and Tula comes to learn to be far more accepting of her heritage and her family. Part two is less funny and less engaging – a convoluted plot about the mother and father of Tula never being truly married, and having a later-life wedding – but revisits the old favourite characters, and introduces a daughter to take up the ‘growing-pains-culture-clash’ dynamic (Tula repeating her father’s iconic line in a nice way).  

My Big Fat 3k Wedding has now divested itself of all humour and winsomeness. Gus (the patriarch) is dead, and his widow may have dementia. It was his dying wish that his children take his old diary and hand it over to his three childhood friends. Its Holiday on the Buses then. Its ‘we-have-run-out-of-ideas’ so let’s go abroad. It’s a travelogue rather than a rom-com, focused on giving you an lovely panoramic shot of provincial Greek living. That aspect of it is fairly spectacular: the cliffs, the sea, the distressed cottages with just the right amount of cracked plaster and whitewash…ah, 90 minutes of that would’ve been lovely. Instead, the truly great character of the Greek countryside is constantly sidelined by turgid dialogue and performances that are either flatter than a pita or a gurning mess better suited to children’s television. There is one good joke delivered in such a staccato as to miss the punchline, half of the original characters are absent, and the wedding comes out of nowhere and doesn’t have any impact. 

The truly frustrating thing is that there seems to be no central theme, no thrust, no point. The first was a classic rom-com, with elements of culture clash and ugly duckling and mad families. The second was about aging and how parenting changes you. 3k Wedding has too many themes and none. A storyline about having a parent with dementia, ignored. A story about grief, barely given the time of day. A story about forbidden love and refugees and the migrant crisis, there only when convenient. A story about bucolic provinciality coping with a 21st century world, there only in snatches. The closest thing to a coherent theme is that of culture and soil and homeland having a pull and a power on even those who grew up across an ocean, and that is a genuinely interesting idea to explore…then a gurn and a non-joke and a shot of a goat…its rubbish. 

1.5 stars. 

The Equalizer 3

A serious looking man in black sits pensively on a carved chair.
The Equalizer will not be happy with this review.

A travelogue at the start of the month and one at the end with The Equalizer 3. 3qualizer is a second reuniting of star Denzel Washington and director Antoine Fuqua, who made some cinematic magic with the first film. Denzel is Robert McCall, an expert government assassin who can kill you within 9 seconds, and that’s without a weapon in his hand. McCall starts the first film adrift, his wife has died and he is retired and now he has no direction or purpose. His spark of life is reignited when he meets a young prostitute, takes pity on her, and proceeds to kill every Russian mobster who has ever even looked at her.  

It is glorious. McCall’s obsessive-compulsive precision is turned into a joyous conceit where he can say exactly how long it will take him to kill every person in the room. It is pacy, it is non-stop, with a simple yet effective plot and a mesmerising Denzel performance (when is he anything less!?). The second instalment is less effective, with a more meandering plot, but still good fun. McCall has decided he will find meaning in his later life by putting his skills to the service of the underdog. He is The Equalizer, cutting villains down to size and bringing justice to the lowly. He takes on a fatherly duty with a young man who is in danger of joining a gang, and he executes all the bad men who killed his oldest friend.  

3qualizer is…in Italy. Why is it in Italy? No idea. Perhaps McCall has caused too much property damage in the US. McCall is sitting in a chair in a wine cellar in Sicily. A bad man walks in. He informs him how many seconds it would take and then dispatches the rotters. As he is leaving he is shot (in the buttocks?) by the young son of the chief baddy. He drives as far as the Amalfi Coast where he is saved by a local policeman and a local doctor. Then…he goes for walks. He enjoys Italian coffee. He meets the locals. He eats pasta. He becomes both dull and unbearably quirky at the same time.  

There is no real plot. Mafiosi terrorise the town for no discernible reason. McCall kills them. More Mafiosi come. McCall kills them. Two…two action scenes after the wine cellar, that is all I counted. When the film ended I had to do a double take and wonder if I’d fallen asleep. I’m not suggesting the first two films were Barry Lyndon, but they had a plot with some twists and turns – 3qualizer has a whole lot of scenery. Like Greece, the Amalfi Coast looks gorgeous, but I didn’t pay my money to watch an extended message by the Italian tourist board.  

There’s a side-story about a CIA agent cutting her teeth on the fallout of the Sicily shootout…why? Mysterious as McCall’s original presence there. Nothing makes any sense or connects and it's just as turgid as 3k Wedding, which is far worse a sin for an action movie to commit. So you know, both questions are answered at the end of the film and the answers relate to nothing, NOTHING we see in the main body of the film. 

McCall’s story ends with him being embraced by the villagers and him embracing them…? I HAVE NO IDEA! It is unclear and sloppy, and (perhaps because of the boredom he must have felt while filming) Denzel Washington has turned McCall’s dangerous precision into a series of tics and twitches which are simply alarming.  

1 star. 

Two very disappointing cinematic outings which, despite being very different genres, make the same errors. Perhaps because they seem to be scrabbling to explore the same theme. What is home? What does it mean to be home and know you are home? What does it mean to be comfortable and accepted and know yourself as yourself in the place that you are? Tula seems to be trying to understand this and explore the entire concept of the ‘immigrant mindset’ by going to Greece to see her father’s village…I think this is what she is doing, again, the film makes it hard to understand its own themes. McCall is a man who has no home – his career was spent travelling (alienated from his home soil), his wife is dead (alienated from his family), and he is a man who has killed too many people (alienated from himself). Perhaps a small fishing village will give him the simplicity of life that can save his sense of self. 

Both Tula and McCall start to unravel their existential crises by fleeing the big city, embracing quieter and humbler surroundings, and coming to understand the nature of community that is symbiotic and self-giving and joyous (something McCall has never had, and something Tula has struggled with in terms of her own family). In both, there is something of a monastic pattern. Coming away from distraction and metropolitan living and building a community of reciprocity in the wilderness, this is the aboriginal pattern of life for the monk and the nun – from St Anthony in Egypt to St Benedict in Italy, Christians in the East and West have benefited greatly from the prayers and example of holy men and women who live the ‘religious life’. 

The great insights of monastic living – simpler living of work and rest in intentional community where one lives from the whole as much as for the self – are having a bit of a come-back in secular society. Whether it is the meditative practice of the Desert Fathers entering mindfulness manuals, or the Rule of St Benedict (ordering the life in community for a Benedictine monk) being used to train managers in major companies, the wisdom of monasticism has endured even into the 21st century post-Christian world. Tula and McCall find some peace in this wisdom; they don’t embrace the religious life, but they do find comfort and stillness and real joy in a life that slows its pace and opens itself up to a community of service and sacrifice and love. 3k Wedding might symbolise this with the presence of an actual monk in the film…doubtful, but one can hope. 

This is an insight far better expressed by reading about monasticism. Do that, rather than watch these films. They’re rubbish.

Review
Books
Comedy
Culture
Trauma
5 min read

Miranda Hart's diagnosis of the unseen

Beyond a medical illness she's on to something supernatural.
On a TV chat show, guests look to one of their own talking to the audience.
Mirnada regales a chat show.

There I was, standing in the book aisle with a choice before me. One that would dictate my mental state for the week ahead: I could pick up Boris Johnson’s hotly anticipated autobiography (although, at £30, it would mean putting the bottle of wine in my basket back on the shelf) or I could choose Miranda Hart’s latest literary offering.  

Externally, all seemed calm. Internally, an almighty battle of the books was raging within me. The price of Boris’ ruled out the option of buying both. So, which should I pick? Whose voice should I invite to live inside my brain for the next five days? Both books were offering me a cultural bandwagon to hop on, I just had to decide which wagon looked like the better option.  

Boris… Miranda… Boris… Miranda… Boris… Miranda…  

After some intense deliberation, I popped BoJo’s memoir back on the shelf and became the proud owner of Miranda Hart’s new book. And I must admit, after hearing from friends who chose Boris to be the victor of their own battle of the books, I am very happy with my decision.  

Miranda Hart, the deeply beloved comic actor, sit-com writer, and stand-up comedian, hasn’t been entirely honest with us. For decades, she has been suffering with what she now knows to be Lyme Disease. In her book, she draws back the curtain and reveals a lifetime worth of suffering with illness after illness – bronchitis, tonsillitis, pericarditis, gastroenteritis, labyrinthitis – as Miranda succinctly puts it, ‘too many itises’. Despite illness being her body’s default state, Miranda kept calm(ish) and kept on. That is, until around a decade ago when her symptoms became simply unbearable.  

She tells the story of collapsing onto her living room floor, extreme fatigue rendering her utterly unable to pick herself up. This was the beginning of months of being bedbound and years of having to press pause on her life. Miranda recalls how she wept with relief at being able to crawl to the bathroom, of how she had to watch the television with sunglasses on because of neurological symptoms, and how she would ‘look at a cup of tea on the table and wonder if I had the strength to take a sip’.  She also paints a terrifying picture of not being believed - of living with an illness that nobody can understand, of suffering with symptoms that have no explanation. Miranda contracted Lyme Disease when she was fourteen, and had it diagnosed when she was in her forties.  

It seems that Miranda Hart is trusting that all that she can see is not all that there is – that her suffering is not the truest thing about her and that she doesn’t need to be the source of all of her healing. 

For those with no experience of living with a chronic illness, Miranda’s honesty will open your eyes to the pain and frustration that comes with your body not allowing you to live the life you crave. If you do have experience of chronic illness, this book will make you feel seen. 

But, alas, this is Miranda Hart we’re talking about. If you’re looking for a woe-is-me book, this isn’t it (maybe you’d have more luck trying Boris?). This book is brimming with:  

A) End-of-chapter dance breaks 

B) Jokes about wind (obviously)  

C) Theology 

I kid you not.  

Each of her chapters outline a ‘treasure’ that she has found in the depth of her suffering, the ‘watchwords’ that she uses to encapsulate these treasures are: love, faithfulness, peace, self-control, kindness, goodness, joy, gentleness and patience.  

I got to chapter four of the book and had myself a real – ‘hang on a minute…’ - moment. As a Christian, I’ve grown up with another way of grouping those words together: I call them ‘the fruits of the Spirit’. 

By chapter five I was convinced: Miranda Hart has released a spiritual book.  

She has, quite excellently, trojan-horsed a bunch of Bible into the Sunday Times best-seller’s chart. And nobody seems to have noticed, I almost feel a little guilty for outing her. All the book reviews I’ve read note the hard-won warmth and wisdom included in this book (both of which are there, by the way) and conclude that it is a truly lovely self-help manual. And that’s where they’re wrong.  

This is precisely not self-help.  

In fact, I get the subtle sense that the self-help industry is one that irks Miranda a little bit, and understandably so – the idea that we can ice-bath ourselves into wellness must sound odd to someone who can’t pick themselves up off their living room floor. So, I’ll say it again: self-help is not what this book is.  

Instead, it seems that Miranda Hart is trusting that all that she can see is not all that there is – that her suffering is not the truest thing about her and that she doesn’t need to be the source of all of her healing. She mentions, again and again, that the truest thing about her (and us, her 'Dear Reader Chums') is that she, and we, are loved. Deeply, unconditionally, unshakably loved. We haven’t earnt it and therefore can’t lose it. In her darkest moments, she had lost everything – her career, her social life, her home, her hopes and dreams - but she never lost that love. Everything else she has to say in the book flows from that belief.  

I happen to think she’s dead right – but that is, undeniably, a faith statement. This book is built upon them.  

And listen, you could read this lovely book – giggle and weep your way through it – without ever sensing anything supernatural within it. But, make no mistake, there is the supernatural within it. 

What Miranda has affectionately called her ‘treasures’ and the Bible calls ‘the fruits of the Spirit’ are just that; they’re what grow when one lives a life informed by and infused with God’s spirit. They’re the tangible symptoms of putting yourself in God’s presence, of keeping company with him. They are him rubbing off on us.  

What I’m trying to get at is this: these ‘fruits’, they’re seen in us, but they’re all God. They’re not the fruits of the self and so the way to obtain them cannot be self-help.  

Miranda obviously appreciates that belief in any divine/supernatural/transcendent thing can be complex, that the notion of ‘god’ can come with baggage, and religion can be an all-out no-no. And so, she is incredibly subtle with what she has to say. This book is not self-help, but it’s not evangelism either. She uses her beloved ‘ists’ (phycologists, neurologists, sociologists etc.) to unpack the ‘treasures’/’fruits’, showing how recent research and ancient religion have many of the same things to say.  

And listen, you could read this lovely book – giggle and weep your way through it – without ever sensing anything supernatural within it. But, make no mistake, there is the supernatural within it. From the opening page to the closing one, God’s there, hidden in plain sight.  

I really am unspeakably glad I didn’t pick Boris.