Dir. Jay Roach
Meet the Fockers promises a lot, especially with its powerhouse cast, but ultimately it’s like having your parents knocking on your door during a moment of passion - lots of great build-up, only to have a disappointing climax.
In Meet the Fockers, the sequel to Meet the Parents, Ben Stiller reprises his role as Gaylord/Greg Focker, male nurse and all-around object of suspicion and scorn for his father-in-law, former CIA agent Jack Byrnes (Robert De Niro). In the first film, Greg tried to win entry into Jack’s “Circle of Trust”. This time round, the comedy centres around the interactions between the uptight Byrnes family and Greg’s own ultra-liberal, touchy-feely parents. Barbra Streisand, coming out of retirement, plays Greg’s sex-therapist mother Roz with aplomb, while Dustin Hoffman shares in the laughs as the other copiously copulating Focker.
So the set up is in place (the plot, as you might expect, centres around getting Jack to trust the Fockers), and the actors in question certainly can do comedy. Yet, like an incontinent man, Meet the Fockers can’t quite hit its mark. I’ll admit I was already averse to seeing Ben Stiller reprising yet another one of his “awkward put-upon man” roles, and this film, while not completely cringe-worthy, doesn’t really showcase Stiller’s considerable comic potential. In numerous scenes, including the ones where Greg goes on stage under the influence of truth serum and where the trio of males tangle with the crazy cop, the punchlines come far weaker than they should have. Even the scene where Roz gives a massage to the uptight Jack doesn’t have a happy ending of laughter release.
Ultimately, the pathetic use of the Fockers’ madly humping dog as a tool for comedy signifies something about Meet the Fockers: the film ends up seeming as though guided by an idea of what others might find funny (“hey, let’s throw in a horny dog!”), but it never really dares to go for the jugular. It’s a film that may inspire mild sniggers, but that’s sad when what you want are full-bellied laughs.