Kings of Mykonos: Wog Boy 2

Kings of Mykonos: Wog Boy 2

By Jonathan Fisher, May 27th, 2010

Here's a sequel I didn't know we needed. Kings of Mykonos: Wog Boy 2 is Nick Giannopolous' return to the silver screen as Steve, the lovable Greek-Australian who has copped stick his whole life for being a 'wog' -- and is proud of it.

The first Wog Boy movie was a long time ago -- ten years, in fact. I remember chuckling at it with my high school friends, and I also recall that there was a bit of a movement amongst Greek-Australians at my school to reclaim the word 'wog' in the same way that Nick Giannopolous did in that first movie. Ten years later, Giannopolous has wheeled out the same character. This one will probably remind Giannopolous' core audience how much they like him, as it's a passably funny movie with just enough juice to satisfy an established fan, but perhaps not enough to earn many new ones over the age of 15.


The film opens with Steve (Giannopolous) leading his proudly Greek-Australian life in much the same way as he did at the end of the first Wog Boy movie. He's in love with his car, and his bromance with fellow wog, the Italian-Australian Frank (Vince Colosimo) is in full swing. Early in the film, Steve discovers that he has a long-lost uncle in Mykonos who has recently passed away, leaving Steve a beach worth a fair chunk of change -- 2 million euros, a sum that the Greek economy would happily take for free at the moment.

Steve and Frank head over to Mykonos to attempt to claim Steve's inheritance, and the film turns into an interesting vignette of what it must be like for first or second generation Greek-Australians to return to their motherland for the first time. In the stunning island of Mykonos, Steve and Frank have several misadventures. The first involves their efforts to claim the inheritance, thwarted by local businessman Mihali (Andrew Dimitriades) and systemic bureaucratic Greek corruption. This movie has a peculiarly prescient subtext about the manner in which the Greek economy is run ("Greekonomics", as Steve calls it in the film). There's a funny moment in which Steve tells his patrons at his newly-inherited seaside cafe that even though they're family, they'll have to pay for their meals because the cafe is going broke. Everyone stands up, furious, and leaves. All the joke needed was for a few E.U. officials to wander around the restaurant, picking up the tab for all the Greek revelers.

The second adventure involves the two boys chasing after women, Miss Italy (Cosima Coppola) for Frank, and Zoe (Zeta Makrypoulia) for Steve. The romances, in parts, are sweet-hearted, but hardly ground-shaking, and all the ogling of the two women in skimpy bikinis, while pleasant enough, becomes kind of smarmy. Almost as smarmy as the "King of Mykonos" that Frank is trying to dethrone, a gross middle-aged Italian guy named Pierluigi (played by Hercules himself, Kevin Sorbo) who claims to have bedded 43 of those lovely Mykonos lasses in just a month.

Despite Nick Giannopolous' sweet nature as Steve (he really is quite an endearing character up there on screen), Kings of Mykonos: Wog Boy 2 was not quite my cup of tea. The female objectification got just a little too strong, the jokes were more miss than hit, and most of the jokes weren't unfunny because they were offensive... they were just lame. There were aspects of Wog Boy 2 that I liked -- the way in which the third act moves in a completely unpredictable direction, the aforementioned "Greekonomics" gag, and a side-splittingly funny scene in which Steve uses Gallipolli as inspiration for a motor race, only to be met with incredulity and confusion as the Greeks fail to understand why Australia celebrates a loss so grandly. Too often, though, Kings of Mykonos: Wog Boy 2 felt a little too much like a second-chance grab at an already established cash cow.

Kings of Mykonos: Wog Boy 2 trailer: