Mark Reviews Movies: EASTER SUNDAY

Easter Sunday, Universal Pictures

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | August 5, 2022

Stand-up comedian and occasional actor Jo Koy plays Joe Valencia, a stand-up comedian trying to become an actor, in Easter Sunday. The obvious joke to make here is that Koy's first starring role isn't much of a stretch, but that's too obvious.

In fact, Koy comes across as comfortably amiable in this movie, which will probably help in his career away from the clubs, theaters, and larger venues where he has had notable success as a comedian. A good personality goes a long way in the movies, and Koy is a good enough sport to smile through and otherwise seem to care in this contrived and messy comedy about a holiday get-together with a dysfunctional family.

Koy's Joe is certainly a character we've seen before. It feels like a go-to persona for stand-up comics who have made it big enough to get their own television series or movie that's broadly inspired by their own lives. Joe isn't famous yet, but he desperately wants to be. One day, a person who's famous enough to get a leading role in a movie or TV show will be honest enough to actually be that level of famous as his or her fictional counterpart. This character is an inconsistent mixture of famous, in that a lot of people recognize him from a beer commercial, and underdog, in that some people don't and he's auditioning for a role on television.

Joe's gigs at Los Angeles clubs sell fine, one supposes, although, for a story about professional comic, there are maybe two opportunities for Koy to channel his on-stage persona and pull from his material. The first is an introduction to the character and the basics of the dynamics of his Filipino family—mainly his mother, who's great at guilt trips and not hiding how disappointed she is that Joe hasn't become a doctor, a lawyer, or a pilot.

The second scene of the character's stand-up awkwardly arrives at Easter Mass (The priest is mad Joe hasn't gotten his demo tape to a record producer), which is somehow crammed into a packed plot. That plot includes a four-hour road trip with Joe's son Junior (Brandon Wardell) and an Easter lunch that erupts in a lot of drama. Basically, Joe's mother Susan (Lydia Gaston) and his aunt Theresa (Tia Carrere) are fighting, and the rest of the family thinks Joe can fix it.

The lunch sets up at least two other subplots. One of those is a lengthy adventure to help Joe's cousin Eugene (Eugene Cordero) get $40,000 to pay back a local gangster (played by Asif Ali), and the whole affair climaxes with a traditional holiday dinner, which has all of those threads and conflicts intersecting and resolving with almost no effort (A karaoke sing-along is enough, apparently).

That's not including the running question of Joe's potential casting as the wacky neighbor in the pilot for a sitcom (He refuses to do a Filipino accent for the role as a cheap joke, which is a much more interesting conflict than almost anything else here). For that matter, there's also the question of whether or not the father can make time for his son—who also gets a possible love interest in Eva Noblezada's Ruth—while all of these complications are whirling around him. It's a relatively minor issue, but Joe's hometown of Daly City almost seems as if it exists in some temporal vortex where time slows down, considering just how much happens within a matter of the few hours during which this story takes place.

The screenplay by Kate Angelo and Ken Cheng is filled with story ideas—none of them particularly original, funny, or serving as a vehicle for Koy's comedic chops and personality to drive on their own. Koy plays a supporting role here, although it's not to the bigger personalities of his mostly stereotypical or broadly eccentric family members. It's to the sheer number of complications and obstacles and throwaway gags that Angelo and Cheng have concocted for the character.

The result is a mess, occasionally coming to life with brief appearances from Tiffany Haddish, as Joe's cop ex-girlfriend, and Lou Diamond Phillips, who plays himself with admirably genuine and self-deprecating gusto. Even those bright spots burn out quickly, with Haddish clearly improvising her way through a dead-end scene and Phillips putting everyone else in his shadow. Yes, that includes the movie's star.

Koy is generally likeable in Easter Sunday. Given the movie's mere existence, he's probably funny, too. This movie doesn't seem to care to prove, utilize, or just suggest that likely fact.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products