PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 12/22/04)


At the feel-good conclusion to 2000’s Meet the Parents, male nurse and easy target Gaylord “Greg” Focker (ubiquitous pratfall-artist Ben Stiller) managed to survive truth-extracting torment and snowballing humiliation to win over future father-in-law Jack Byrnes (Robert De Niro), an intimidatingly dogmatic ex-CIA operative.  Moderately funny but monstrously successful, the movie was safely low-to-middlebrow and simplistic enough to refurbish and repackage as a sequel under this year’s Xmas tree.

Culture-clashing through the snow, in a one-joke open sleigh, Meet the Fockers goes, laughing all the way . . . to the bank.  The wedding is still on, and the entire cast from Parents has returned—including the underdeveloped background-dressing team of Blythe Danner as “the mother-in-law” and Teri Polo as “the fiancée”—for a 48-hour Florida weekend with Greg’s oversensitive, hippie-Jew parents.  That’s the bulk of the premise, as the ultra-conservative Byrneses put their values to the test against the uncomfortably hedonistic Roz and Bernie Focker (Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman), a sex therapist for senior citizens and a stay-at-home dad, respectively.  “Like studying a frozen caveman, if I can see where you came from, I’ll have a better idea of where you’re going,” hard-ass Jack lectures Greg.  One can almost taste the stagnantly infantile wackiness about to ensue in this infrequently hilarious family feud.

The Law of Sequels dictates not just more of the same, but a further beefing-up of what worked once before.  The first movie’s water volleyball outburst is now a violent game of touch football, Jinxy the cat now has a hyperactively humping dog counterpart, and what’s with the precocious toddler who says “asshole” phonetically, ad nauseum?  De Niro is constantly upstaged by the showstopping, sunburnt duo of Streisand and Hoffman, but even their material is so recycled (more Focker puns, etc.) that it doesn’t matter who steals the most chuckles.  Are foreskin-in-the-fondue and missing testicle jokes adequate forms of mainstream wit when the vessel is a gung-ho dream cast of A-listers?  Perhaps if Fockers was written and filmed after this election year, director Jay Roach could have cultivated this vanilla kvetch-comedy into a smart sociopolitical satire starring red-state parents meeting the new blue.

—Aaron Hillis