Jo Koy as Joe Valencia on Easter Sunday. Photo: Universal Pictures
It’s a rare thing these days for a studio comedy to open in theaters without a blockbuster intellectual property to back it up. This makes Easter Sunday feel like an event in some ways, certainly as a benchmark of Filipino representation in mainstream American culture, but mostly now as a title that Universal Pictures felt was more appropriate for the community theater experience than for the comfort of the sofa. a streaming service. All that is needed to complete the experience is that the film is funny.
Easter Sunday is not much fun.
To be fair, the premise does have some promise. Comedian Jo Koy stars as Joe Valencia, a fictionalized version of himself trying to make his way from stand-up to sitcom. After an audition goes awry when the casting director asks him to act with an accent, Joe enlists his agent (director and Broken Lizard alum Jay Chandrasekhar) to try and save his chances of landing the part. However, their constant contact quickly becomes a stumbling block between Joe and his teenage son Junior (Brandon Wardell), and ultimately a major complication when he joins his extended family’s Easter Sunday celebration.
DIRECTOR
Jay Chandrasekhar
SYNOPSIS
Set around a family gathering to celebrate Easter Sunday, the comedy is based on the life experiences and stand-up comedy of Jo Koy.
To be fair, Joe’s professional life is far from the first priority for the rest of his family, whose members are mostly trying to navigate a long-standing conflict between his mother (Lydia Gaston) and Theresa (Tia Carrere), his Aunt. Neither Joe’s sister (Elena Juatco) nor his tit(s) (including Melody Butiu, Joey Guila and Rodney To) know how or why their fight started, but the tension is ripe for comedy, at least in theory . But aside from knowing nods to the apparent universality of Filipino family feuds, there aren’t many actual jokes.
Instead, the film invests screen time in an increasingly absurd subplot involving Joe’s cousin Eugene (Eugene Cordero), who invested Joe’s seed money in what Eugene calls a “publicity truck,” in taco truck place they both agreed on. about Faster than you can say “unnecessary crime subplot,” Joe finds himself drawn into a scheme involving a disgruntled “luxury goods dealer” named Tony Daytona (Asif Ali), Manny Pacquiao’s stolen boxing gloves, and a quest to close them for cash. . The odd situation exemplifies the film’s over-reliance on comedy that emerges from extreme scenarios rather than upping the stakes of Joe and his family’s plight with laugh lines or even visual gags.
Easter Sunday | Official trailer [HD]
That said, the few efforts made to highlight his comics hold the film back repeatedly. The calculated interruption of an Easter sermon leads to a literal set. A lackluster high-speed chase serves as a set-up for Tiffany Haddish, playing a police officer, to perform as her flirtatious, fast-talking self. Not to doom it with faint praise, but a cameo during a visit to a potential buyer of the stolen gloves will almost certainly be the highlight of the film for many. The film’s commitment to being genuinely funny always feels right around the corner, instead of relying too often and lazily on the overlapping, well-established and still underexplored threads of family drama that give structure to the movie
And once again, the earthy sweetness of the sitcom-style domestic struggle feels directly at odds with the over-the-top threat of violence that drives the film’s stakes. It feels as if a bland drama and an action film were forced by their stressed-out parents to share a runtime, intending to give both a chance to succeed, but preventing either from thriving independent Easter Sunday, for all its faults, is still nominally watchable, but it’s a wasteland with unfocused potential. This deserved to be a great theatrical event, but this particular party will be too easily forgotten.