The Wedding Banquet

The Wedding Banquet

27/1/2025 1h 43m 7.0/10

Overview

Frustrated with his commitment-phobic boyfriend Chris and running out of time, Min makes a proposal: a green-card marriage with their friend Angela in exchange for her partner Lee's expensive IVF. Elopement plans are upended, however, when Min's grandmother surprises them with an extravagant Korean wedding banquet.

Director

Andrew Ahn

Top Billed Cast

Han Gi-chan

Han Gi-chan

Min

Youn Yuh-jung

Youn Yuh-jung

Ja-Young

Joan Chen

Joan Chen

May Chen

Bowen Yang

Bowen Yang

Chris

Lily Gladstone

Lily Gladstone

Lee

Kelly Marie Tran

Kelly Marie Tran

Angela

Reviews

CinemaSerf

CinemaSerf

5/25/2025

6/10

Remember the “Proposal” (2009)? Well this is a sort of derivative of that only here it is two gay couples who decide that a bit of judicious legerdemain might enable one to get a green card and another to fund some fertility treatment. You see, commitment-phobe “Chris” (Bowen Wang) has been with his wealthy Korean boyfriend “Min” (Han Gi-Chan) for years but won’t marry him. This irks his partner who also has pressures from his family at home who want to bring him home to work in the family business and marry a nice girl. Meantime, best pal “Lee” (Lily Gladstone) and girlfriend “Angela” (Kelly Marie Tran) are trying to conceive via IVF but are having no luck. It would appear that the solution to both of their problems might lie in a marriage of convenience. Far-fetched? Well the best bit is yet to come as grandma (Youn Yuh-jung) arrives from Seoul determined to find out just what is going on and to protect her grandson from what she clearly suspects is some money-grabbers. It takes her about two minutes to suss things out so now the couples have to pray that she will go along with their scheme, else everything will come crashing down. There are a few funny scenes here, but for the most part if you watch any amount of American gay cinema then you will have seen this all before. Wang offers us very little new here and the plot lurches just a bit too close to the preposterous for me as the underlying pretence of the theme goes from silly to sillier and the characterisations slip effortlessly into multifarious, sometimes quite cringeworthy, stereotypes. I do hope it takes a few quid at the box office, though, because Han Gi-chan could sure use a decent meal!

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