THE WEDDING BANQUET (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

The Wedding Banquet, Bleecker Street

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 17, 2025

The Wedding Banquet is a loose remake of a 1993 film of the same name, which was certainly of its time but now feels surprisingly ahead of it, too. That film, an early one from director Ang Lee, was about a Taiwanese man living in New York City who arranges a fake marriage with a woman so that she can receive a green card and he can appease his parents—who don't know and seemingly wouldn't approve of the fact that he's in a committed relationship with another man.

Co-writer/director Andrew Ahn has transformed that relatively simple comedic premise into something far more convoluted, with a bigger cast of key characters and a string of misunderstandings, mistakes, and other complications. That certainly amplifies the number and potential intensity of the conflicts, but it also abandons the story's focus on its characters.

Shifting the backdrop to Seattle, the story this time around, written by Ahn and James Schamus (who also co-wrote the '93 film), features two couples. One is made up of Min (Han Gi-Chan), the heir to a major corporation in South Korea, and Chris (Bowen Yang), a doctorate student on a break from his education who provides birdwatching tours.

Min's visa is about to expire, and while the simple solution would be for him and his longtime boyfriend to marry, Chris is beyond the indecisive type. When Min proposes, Chris turns him down, partly because he still doesn't feel worthy of such a good partner but also because Min hasn't come out to his grandparents, who still have control of a sizeable trust of money for him and might disown their grandson if they learn he is gay.

The unlikely answer to all of this could come from the other couple at the center of the story. They're Angela (Kelly Marie Tran), who has known and been best friends with Chris since college, and Lee (Lily Gladstone), a professional activist. They are currently in the process of a second attempt at having a child via in-vitro fertilization, but when Lee's pregnancy doesn't take again, it looks as if they're out of options. They've already re-mortgaged Lee's house, where Chris lives out of the garage, while saving cash might take too long and Angela has no interest in being pregnant.

All of this uncertainty leads to two events that only to seem to exist here to raise as much conflict as possible down the line. The first is the foundation of the plot, when Min and Lee come up with a similar but sort-of flipped scheme from the source material. If Min and Angela set up a sham marriage, he can get his green card and evade the judgment of his grandparents, while Min will give her and Lee the money to try IVF for a third time in exchange.

The second incident is something that happened much later in the original film. Without saying too much for those unfamiliar with it, let's just say that Chris and Angela, in addition to being friends, also dated during their freshman year—before either of them felt comfortable enough to be open about their sexuality. That development in the '93 film is certainly its most questionable decision, so if Ahn and Schamus are going to hold on to it in this version, maybe it's for the best that they get it out of the way as quickly as possible.

The big issue here—beyond how the whole movie feels as if it's establishing future snags and inevitable payoffs, instead of actual characters and relationships, from the start—is that the larger cast and more elaborate plotting mean that the story never finds a real core. In theory, it's in this group of friends and lovers, who have formed a kind of chosen family, but that never comes through here, really.

After all, everyone is in the midst of some crisis here almost from the get-go. Min's plan eventually leads his grandmother Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-jung) to come from South Korea to Seattle, leading him to have to face her reaction when she sees right through the phony-marriage scheme. Chris has his baggage of not feeling as if he's good enough for anything or anyone, but whatever past he and his cousin Kendall (Bobo Le) might have experienced is given short shrift, forcing the cousin to basically become a sounding board for Chris' feelings.

Meanwhile, Angela has her mother May (Joan Chen), who initially shunned her daughter after she came out but is now a celebrated advocate, with whom to deal, and for whatever promise Lee may show as a character at the start, the focus on the plotting quickly reveals that she has no real place within it. Each character comes across as one of two extremes throughout: either just a gear in the complicated plan or so isolated from the other characters that there's never a sense of whose story this is meant to be.

The Wedding Banquet has, unfortunately, missed the character-based point of the original. On its own, though, the movie is so busy trying to raise the stakes of this tale that it loses sight of anything other than how broadly funny and complicated it can be.

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