Little new from Little Fockers

The rows keep coming: Robert De Niro, Owen Wilson, Ben Stiller and Harvey Keitel
10 April 2012

In Meet the Parents (2000), Greg Focker met the Byrnes, stressfully. In Meet the Fockers (2004), the two families got together, catastrophically, and the film, which cost $80 million, grossed $517 million worldwide, the second most successful comedy ever.

So why did the next instalment take so long? After the families had met, the producers couldn’t for the life of them think what might usefully come next, that’s why. So much is perfectly clear from Little Fockers. Because they’ve gone ahead and belatedly made this one, even though they still hadn’t worked out what to do.

They must vaguely have hoped that Greg and Pam’s twin children, gecko-loving Henry and resentful Samantha, would supply a next-generation plot. There’s a bit of a story about the struggle to get them into a pretentious private school, Early Humans (headmistress, Laura Dern). Their birthday is coming up, too, and the builders haven’t finished renovating the family’s new house, where Greg and Pam are planning to hold the party. But that’s about it with the twins.

Then there’s some trouble when kooky friend Kevin (Owen Wilson) comes back on the scene, still with a big crush on Pam. Plus Jack Byrnes, having had a heart attack, crazily anoints Greg as the next head of the family, the "Godfocker" in waiting.
Also, Greg is now chief nurse at his hospital, and an incredibly sexy but palpably mad drugs rep, Andi Garcia (Jessica Alba), thinks he can be the friendly face of her company’s new erectile dysfunction drug, Sustengo. He nobly resists her passes but paranoid father-in-law Jack suspects otherwise and starts spying on him again.

There are some misunderstandings. Some projectile vomiting, a tricky enema, and an out-of-control stiffy. No real story, though. Little Fockers isn’t so much a sequel as the decline of the franchise into a lazy soap. To be sure, the big cast are all back, at least for cameos — Robert De Niro as bulgy-eyed Jack; Dustin Hoffman as crackers dad Bernie Focker, this time heavily into flamenco, for reasons that never become apparent; Barbra Streisand as excruciatingly chirpy sex therapist Roz Focker, flogging musical condoms; and, crucially, Ben Stiller, ever hopeful, never lucky, as Greg.

Always a sucker for pratfalls, I laughed at quite a few of the gags. I liked Jack manfully defibrillating himself on mains electricity. I liked Andi, off her head and optimistically stripped to her undies, actually throwing herself right on top of Greg sprawled at the bottom of a deep pit, both getting knocked out. (Breaking news: Jessica Alba does funny).

On the other hand, the film parodies were laborious — Greg and Jack re-enacting first The Godfather, then Jaws. Harvey Keitel appears briefly as Greg’s truculent builder solely to have a face-off with De Niro and evoke Taxi Driver. Why bother? And the epilogue, in which, after the fights, the families get together for a happy Christmas, is dire — even when Bernie tells the outraged Jack that, as a present, he snipped his pubes and sent them off for DNA testing, getting back the happy news that Jack is "1/23rd Israelite — welcome to the tribe!"

Little Fockers just isn’t nasty enough, a series too invested now in its own lovability. True, after the enormity of a real family Christmas, watching these Fockers fall out could prove some kind of merciful relief. But you might do even better with the box set of Outnumbered.

Meet The Parents: Little Fockers
Cert: 12A

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