Joe Coy as Joe Valencia in Easter Sunday. Photo: Universal Pictures
It’s rare these days for a studio comedy to hit theaters without a blockbuster intellectual property to back it up. It makes Easter Sunday feel like an event in some ways—certainly as a landmark of Filipino representation in mainstream American culture, but especially at the moment as a title that Universal Pictures felt was more suited to the general theatrical experience than comfort. on the couch streaming service. All that is needed for the experience to be complete is for the film to be funny.
Easter Sunday is not very funny.
To be fair, the premise is promising. Comedian Joe Coy plays Joe Valencia, a fictional version of himself trying to make his way from stand-up to sitcom. After the audition goes awry when the casting director asks him to act with an accent, Joe enlists his agent (director and Broken Lizard alumnus Jay Chandrasekhar) to try and save his chances of landing the part. However, their constant contact quickly becomes an obstacle between Joe and his teenage son, Junior (Brandon Wardle), and ultimately a major complication when he joins the extended family’s celebration on Easter Sunday.
DIRECTOR
Jay Chandrasekhar
SYNOPSIS
Set around a family gathering to celebrate Easter, the comedy is based on Joe Coy’s life experiences and stand-up comedy.
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 Teresa (Tia Carrere). his Tita. Neither Joe’s sister (Elena Huatco) nor his tita or tita (including Melody Butiu, Joey Guila and Rodney To) know how or why their fight began, but the tension is ripe for comedy—at least in theory. But aside from the knowledge of the obvious universality of Filipino family struggles, there aren’t many real jokes.
Instead, the film invests screen time in an increasingly absurd subplot involving Joe’s cousin Eugene (Eugene Cordero), who invests seed money from Joe in what Eugene calls a “hip truck” rather than the taco truck the two were talking about. agreed upon. Faster than you can say “needless criminal subplot,” Joe finds himself embroiled in a scheme involving a disgruntled “luxury dealer” named Tony Daytona (Asif Ali), Manny Pacquiao’s stolen boxing gloves, and a mission to secure them for money. The odd situation illustrates the film’s over-reliance on comedy stemming from extreme scenarios rather than raising the stakes for Joe and his family members with laugh lines or even jokes.
Easter Sunday | official trailer [HD]
However, the little effort made to focus on the comedians repeatedly stops the film dead. A calculated interruption of an Easter sermon leads to a literal standing up. A lackluster high-speed chase serves as a setup for Tiffany Haddish, who plays a cop, to come across as her fast-talking, flirtatious self. Not to damn him with faint praise, but a cameo during a visit to a prospective 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 just around the corner, instead too often and lazily relying on the overlapping, well-established and still underexplored threads of family drama that give the film its structure.
Then again, the down-to-earth sweetness of the sitcom-style fight seems 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 have been forced by their overstretched parents to share a runtime, with every intention of giving both a chance to succeed, but allowing neither to flourish on their own. Easter Sunday, for all its flaws, is still nominally watchable, but it’s a wasteland of unfocused potential. This deserved to be a major theatrical event, but this particular celebration will be too easily forgotten.
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