Movie Review ~ The Wedding Banquet (2025)

Remaking a beloved film is bold, especially when the original is Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet. Nominated for Best Foreign-Language Film (as it was known then), the 1993 release was a tender dramedy that tackled queerness, tradition, and familial duty with heart and humor. More than three decades later, Fire Island director Andrew Ahn and co-writer James Schamus (returning from the original) revisit that cultural lightning bolt with a new cast and a modern context. While the intention is sincere and the fresh lens updates thoughtful, this remake lands somewhere between homage and missed opportunity, often feeling more emotionally overcast than enlightening.

The plot refresh feels timely: fashion student Min (Han Gi-chan) proposes a green-card marriage to his scientist friend Angela (Kelly Marie Tran, Control Freak) so she can fund IVF treatment with her partner Lee (Lily Gladstone). There’s a catch, though. Min is in a long-term relationship with Chris (Bowen Yang, Wicked), a bird-obsessed writer, afraid of the potential backlash the day Min comes out to his traditional (and wealthy) family living in Korea. Things unravel when Min’s formidable grandmother (Youn Yuh-jung) flies in from Seoul expecting to throw a full-blown wedding celebration for her grandson and his fiancée.

Ahn and Schamus have made an innovative reconfiguration of the original’s stakes, updating the complex intersection of queer identity, family pressure, and immigration politics. But while the themes have aged nicely, the tone has not. Lee’s version was playful and warm even in its awkwardness, but Ahn’s take feels muted—too solemn to be funny, too buttoned-up to cut loose.

The core problem? The leads never quite click, and their chemistry is…politely strained. Gladstone, as usual, is excellent—measured, believable, and entirely locked into the emotional stakes. But she seems to be in a different movie than the rest, not to mention a different friend group. (I just never bought her character would be friends with anyone else in this circle.) Gi-chan struggles with tone; his Korean-language scenes with Yuh-jung are alive with sincerity. However, his English dialogue flattens out, often veering into over-emphasis or a stilted blankness. Yang has charm and humor, but without the script giving him ample comedic or emotional runway, his performance stalls, and I’m not convinced he’s meant to play leading roles. The vulnerability and tension that should be present in Tran’s performance comes off as directionless anxiety, leaving her adrift.

The supporting cast is a different story, and Ahn was lucky to nab scene-stealers like Joan Chen and Yuh-jung. Chen, playing Angela’s sophisticated mother who waves her PFLAG banner wildly, gives a performance equal parts wounded and authentic but doesn’t oversell a thing. And Youn, Oscar already in hand for her unforgettable work in Minari, might just be angling for another trip to the 2026 ceremony. Her role as the family matriarch is layered in ways that catch you off guard, single-handedly becoming the film’s emotional glue. If the film gets any Oscar chatter, it will be because of her.

In his previous work, Ahn has shown good directorial instincts for comedy, and surprisingly, he leans into a more dramatic edge with The Wedding Banquet. There’s a heaviness to every scene, a certain somberness that turns light domestic conflicts into existential reflections. That’s all good, but a determined lack of levity starts to drag the movie down slowly. Scenes waiting for sparkling comic relief are suffocated by fidgety drama, and with Jay Wadley’s score never bounding in to nudge the proceedings back to life, the film never finds its flow. Visually, Ki Jin Kim’s cinematography comes off as uninspired and the production design, especially wardrobe choices for Gladstone’s character, can be distracting instead of character-defining.

Before settling on my review, I saw the film twice—once at the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Film Festival screening, and again at home. That second viewing helped me appreciate Ahn’s craft more but offered the same takeaway: it’s emotionally vibrant on paper but curiously inert on the screen. I didn’t want a cheap laugh-a-minute farce because the original, for all its zaniness, held a potent message on chosen families. Still, this version feels too buttoned-up and weirdly hesitant to lean into the situational absurdity that’s right there, asking to be explored.

It’s especially frustrating because this is the kind of movie we need more of. At a time when LGBTQ rights are under attack—parental rights, marriage rights—there’s real weight in showing stories like these two couples as ordinary, relatable, even trite. That’s radical in its own way, which is why it stings that this remake never quite lands the way it should. The film’s R-rating feels like an unfortunate misstep; this movie could’ve resonated with teens navigating similar intersections, and I wish Ahn had made a few cuts to get this down to a PG-13.

Ahn’s modern take on The Wedding Banquet is meaningful, yes. Important, even. But it’s too careful for its own good. The source material begged for mess, laughter, and contradiction. Instead, this version whispers when it should yell.