The Wedding Banquet (2025)
“Andrew Ahn’s The Wedding Banquet loses some of the original’s essence that made it so compelling in the first place. But from an inclusion standpoint, it’s a slam dunk.”
Title: The Wedding Banquet (2025)
Director: Andrew Ahn 👨🏻🇺🇸
Writers: Screenplay by Andrew Ahn 👨🏻🇺🇸 and James Schamus 👨🏼🇺🇸 based on the original story by Ang Lee 👨🏻🇹🇼, Neil Peng 👨🏻🇹🇼, and James Schamus 👨🏼🇺🇸
Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸
Technical: 3.5/5
In the early 1990s, Ang Lee broke ground by depicting queer and immigrant characters with perfect ease in The Wedding Banquet. Fast-forward to today, and Andrew Ahn’s follow-up uses slick visuals, competent editing, and talented actors to get the job done. But where Lee skillfully used screwball comedy to lighten its family drama, Ahn’s movie lacks balance. Even though both versions of The Wedding Banquet share screenwriter James Schamus, the 2025 film lurches between capital “J” Jokes, such as Bowen Yang ripping off his pants like a stripper, and tearful, melodramatic arguments.
With an emphasis on the latter, The Wedding Banquet devolves into scene after scene of characters holding difficult conversations. They mostly take place between four main characters who share living quarters: Gay couple Chris (Bowen Yang) and Min (Han Gi-Chan), and lesbian couple Lee (Lily Gladstone) and Angela (Kelly Marie Tran). Friend fights, partner fights, and family fights monopolize the screenplay. But as we all know, more isn’t more—The Wedding Banquet’s abundance of angst reduces the overall impact, leaving a low thrum of emotion rather than the gut punches that explode out of pent-up tension, seen in more affecting Asian diaspora movies like Everything Everywhere All At Once (2023) or Turning Red (2022).
To his credit, Ahn engages audiences from start to finish, and it’s a pleasure to see Tran get a visible main role after surviving the clusterfuck of Star Wars’ fanboy bullying. Although the heavy-handed script doesn’t allow any actor to truly shine, as an ensemble, their camaraderie comes easily. It’s fun getting to know this flawed, yet hopeful group of grown-ups as they fumble their way into the next stages of their lives together.
Gender: 5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES
Instead of the original’s centering of two men with one bride thrust between them, Ahn refreshingly gives leading women Angela and Lee equal space next to male couple Chris and Min. Several supporting characters are also women, showing a wide variety of ways to be female or nonbinary. (Gladstone uses she/they pronouns, and it’s unclear how Chris’ cousin Kendall, played by Bobo Le, identifies.)
The script also explores gender-adjacent issues of family planning, IVF, and pregnancy. Ahn and Schamus treat the material through a queer lens that feels ultra modern and relevant to today’s generation of millennials going through similar trials about what it means—and costs, both financially and emotionally—to have a baby in 2025.
Race: 5/5
Both of The Wedding Banquet films explore ethnic identity as a core theme. And with more main characters to play with in Ahn’s follow-up, viewers see a greater breadth of cultural storylines. Chinese, Korean, and Duwamish characters all reference their identities at various points throughout the film, with an added layer of nationality—American-born or foreign-born.
On the one hand, sheer quantity crowds out room for depth. Ahn’s film doesn’t contend with culture clash at the same level of Lee’s film, which had a narrower cast of Taiwanese, Chinese, and white characters. But it still feels groundbreaking to simply enjoy the hijinks between this diverse group of messy friends.
Best of all, Ahn’s movie de-centers whiteness in a way that perhaps the 1993 film never could, at least not if it wanted to see the light of day. Ahn already confronted the issue of racism among gay men in his previous film, Fire Island (2022). It comes as a relief, then, to push beyond all that in The Wedding Banquet, where characters of color dominate the cast.
Bonus for LGBTQ: +1.00
Gay filmmaker Ahn has never shied away from exploring sexual identity in works like Spa Night (2016) or Fire Island. It stands to reason, then, that The Wedding Banquet showers its queer main characters with humor and naturalism. As portrayed with LGBTQ actors like Gladstone, Tran, and Yang, the film effortlessly tackles issues that face queer communities: non-traditional family planning, coming out, tricky relationships with parents and grandparents, and the confusion of navigating binary labels when human sexuality is anything but.
Bonus for Age: +0.25
Actors over 50 years old are underrepresented in media. So it’s great to see Joan Chen, who’s 63 at the time of this review, play Angela’s loving, if self-absorbed mom. Youn Yuh-jung (77) also has an important part as Min’s wealthy but caring grandmother. And as women of color, Chen and Youn help balance the images we see of older adults on screen, who are mostly white men.
That said, neither Chen nor Young’s characters have much dimension. They’re shown in positive lights, yes, but they exist to create feel-good reconciliation stories that center their younger kin. It’s also hard not to compare with their recent, more substantial roles: Chen’s heartrending portrayal as an embattled mom in Dìdi (2024), and Youn’s Oscar-winning turn in Minari (2020) as a badass but fallible grandma. Regardless, it’s still wonderful to see intergenerational storylines woven into a mainstream movie.
Mediaversity Grade: A 4.92/5
Ahn makes the cardinal “sequel” mistake: He goes bigger while losing the original’s essence that made Lee’s The Wedding Banquet so compelling in the first place. But from an inclusion standpoint, it’s a slam dunk to see so many cultures, genders, ages, and sexualities in this competent follow-up to a 1990s classic.
Like The Wedding Banquet? Try these other Asian diaspora films featuring wedding scenes.
Crazy Rich Asians (2018)
Plus One (2019)
The Farewell (2019)