![]() Granted, “Easter Sunday” is a Jo Koy vehicle, but the film’s script and Chandrasekhar’s direction go out of its way to overly flatter the fictionalized version of the comedian. Part of the problem lies with the film’s vain impulses. It’s a rich tapestry of mildly amusing bit parts padding out a paper-thin film. Similarly, Tiffany Haddish also makes an appearance so she can take control of the movie for roughly five minutes, and Lou Diamond Phillips, another famous Filipino who rose to fame playing Mexican-American roles, briefly cameos as himself to deliver a couple jokes. There are some minor bright spots here and there, like Chandrasekhar cameoing as Joe’s agent by almost literally phoning in a performance where he delivers multiple variations on a single joke, i.e., falsely claiming to Joe that he’s in a bad reception area as an excuse to hang up on him. There’s plenty of conspicuous face acting and communal yelling and one-liners about Filipino culture clearly ripped from Koy’s stand-up (“You see all that fog? That’s from all the Filipinos in Daly City using their rice cookers at the same time.”). Granted, it might play very differently if you’re already in the tank for Koy’s comedy, but without that prior, much of the humor scans as too broad or corny. “Easter Sunday” might have shouldered that heavy narrative weight if more jokes landed, but the film also stumbles in that regard. By the end, it’s all just stuff that happens. Though the script dutifully checks in on these subplots every 15 minutes or so, they neither dovetail nor wrap up meaningfully. ![]() These include Joe and his cousin Eugene (Eugene Cordero) trying to pawn a pair of stolen Manny Pacquiao’s gloves while evading their maniacal owner, a feud between Valencia’s mother and his aunt Tita Theresa (Tia Carrere, notably playing a Filipina for the first time in a career spent playing different ethnicities), the strained relationship between Joe and his son (Brandon Wardell), and a potential sitcom deal that might collapse if Joe doesn’t agree to play a role with a stereotypical accent. ![]() While the relationships between Joe and his family are rooted in specific, real-life details, it’s in service of an overly broad, haphazard story involving way too many narrative threads. Unfortunately, those noble intentions don’t suddenly render “Easter Sunday” any less slapdash or unfunny. ‘Bucky F*cking Dent’ Review: David Duchovny Adds a Wistful New Chapter to the Baseball Movie Canon
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