Min (Han Gi-Chan) works at the US offices of his grandfather’s fashion company, but his visa is quickly running out.  His boyfriend, Chris (Bowen Yang), panics when Min proposes, causing a rift between the two.  Next door, Lee (Lily Gladstone) and Angela (Kelly Marie Tran), are having their own issues as they struggle to conceive with IVF.  Min then proposes to Angela, trading the funds for IVF treatment in exchange for a green card marriage, but when news of the engagement reaches Korea, his grandmother, Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-jung), flies to the states to give her grandson a traditional wedding ceremony. 

Andrew Ahn directs The Wedding Banquet, bringing Ang Lee’s 1993 queer classic of the same name forward into the 21st century.  To do so, he enlists James Schamus to cowrite the script with, much in the same way that Schamus co-wrote with Lee over 30 years prior.  Debuting at the 2025 edition of the Sundance Film Festival, Bleecker Street Media rolled the film out nationwide on a little over 1,100, right on the heels of Roshan Sethi’s similarly themed A Nice Indian Boy (2025) from Blue Harbor Entertainment, however the latter title did not even break 100 screens.  Both films follow a similar trajectory, but Ahn is able to modernize his take on this odd couple format and still bring some charm of his own to the table, too. 

The Wedding Banquet comes at a time when the broad romantic comedy really struggles to break through in the marketplace, often pushed to streaming without much thought, so Ahn wisely makes sure that this film is unapologetic in its queer identity, but for all of his modernization he still maintains the unsavory trope of, in this case, a lesbian carrying a gay man’s child.  It is one of the major points that dates Lee’s original film, and it is unfortunate that has remained here, especially since Ahn opened the door to having a frank discussion about the impact that IVF has on modern family planning.  It is not just the inclusion of this accidental pregnancy that causes hackles to be raised against the film, but it also extends into his handling of Angela’s concerns about whether or not she will make a good mother or even want to be a mother at all.  These are all valid concerns, but the script ever so slightly demonizes her for not wanting to bring a child into this world in a way that is does not ever begin to interrogate Chris and Min’s family plans. 

Ahn’s looseness with his characters is the root of many of the issues with The Wedding Banquet as it makes for a very lopsided narrative.  To further complicate things, it also seems that the actors were assigned to the wrong roles.  Most glaringly, Gladstone is underutilized, departing from the film for about 20 minutes and, had it not been for moments with Yuh-jung or May (Joan Chen), Angela’s award-winning ally of a mother, the energy of the film would have come to a total halt in her absence.  Opposite that same coin, Ahn leans far too heavily on Yang, asking the one-note comic actor to show some dramatic chops, and though he does show some signs of promise of being able to develop into a more rounded talent, Ahn and Schamus do the SNL alum no favors with the obtuse and boneheaded writing of Chris.  Tran’s Angela is an equally difficult nut to crack, often asked to be the roadblock that derails and resets the scene instead of offering any real road to resolution, comedic or heartfelt.  Lastly, Gi-Chan’s Min is written as this goofy, head in the clouds optimist that we never quite get the connection between him and Chris.  Ahn’s script is constantly asking the actor to spout these one-off liners, and while Gi-Chan handles it with an affable grace, it almost seems as if the character was written with contempt. 

Though the film is not without quibbles, it clearly comes from a well-intentioned place and from the heart.  Ahn does an incredible job at modernizing the characters and most of the situations, pregnancy plot notwithstanding.  The film, though, never quite comes together to be greater than the sum of its parts.  Moderate chemistry across most, but not all, of the cast, certainly helps, and the unapologetic expression mixed with an endearing found family dynamic lend some authenticity to the endeavor.  Even without the preconceived notion of having to live up to the Lee touchstone, The Wedding Banquet betrays the very thing promised by its title; a farcical banquet.  The wedding ceremony is brief, occupying maybe only 10 minutes of runtime, and even in much of the lead up to the sham event, the script struggles to provide any real comedy safe for a few low hanging one liners.  Within the context of queer and marginalized cinema, however, The Wedding Banquet marks an important moment signifying that the canon has grown deep enough that we can begin looking back, remaking, and revitalizing titles bringing them to a new generation of audiences and showing these queer characters not as tragic figures or as villains, but just people doing their best to get by and make a life and a home for themselves and who they hold dear and that they are not inhibited by the limits of the white picket fence.