My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3

In cinemas now

Despite the proclamations of dewy-eyed pop songs and far-fetched works of fiction, not everything in life is possible. And yet, every now and then, a film will come along that is so preposterously bad it dares you to believe that you really can achieve anything you put your mind to. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 is such a film.

To list the number of amateurish things in Nia Vardalos’ film would be an exercise in exhaustion, but some personal highlights for me include the opening montage, in which a selection of low-resolution stills from the preceding My Big Fat Greek Wedding films are displayed ad nauseam, despite the fact they look like something you’d ask Jeeves to find for you. Honourable mentions also ought to go to Vardalos' screenplay, the dialogue of which is bad enough to make Tommy Wiseau’s The Room read like a Chekovian masterpiece, and the acting from the film’s modest cast, which is more wide-eyed than Charlie Sheen when he was #WINNING.

Even more appalling is the film’s admittedly well-meaning attempts to cover challenging topics such as dementia, parental grief and, perhaps most bizarrely of all, the Syrian refugee crisis. God loves a trier, but a film in which we are repeatedly made to endure a middle-aged man trimming his nasal hair is not the time or place to get that deep.

Nonetheless, there was at least one person guffawing in my screen (though admittedly he may have been insane), challenging me to believe that dreams really can come true. Even on a meagre budget of $12.7 million, no film as bad as this should ever make it to screen but, against all odds, Vardalos and co. got it done. So who knows, maybe The Smiths really will reunite one day.