LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Meet the Fockers: Meet The Parents
built 229 days ago
To say that the success of “Meet the Parents” – which topped the box office for a now-unprecedented 4 straight weeks in October of 2000 – was a surprise would be a huge understatement. Obviously, that raised the bar for the sequel to deliver the goods, so perhaps its not surprising that it took 4 years for original screenwriters Jim Herzfeld and John Hamburg and returning director Jay Roach to make it happen. A good number of jokes are basically recycled from the first film, but many of them still seem to work – particularly where the “Fockers” family name is concerned. Some of the more slapstick moments fall flat and aren’t as “ha-ha” funny as they were the first time around, but they’re so good-natured and over-the-top that they’re still guaranteed to raise a smile.
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It's a toss-up as to who gets the worst end of the deal with Meet the Fockers: the viewer or the film's all-star cast. Fans of Meet the Parents expecting more of the same broad, manic comedy will get it, all right, only this time, the laugh quotient is surprisingly low. The gleefully nasty humor of the first film falls by the wayside, replaced by loud, cartoonish shtick that plays on tired ethnic stereotypes and obvious gags. As for the film's above-the-title stars, they sink to the script's sitcom-level antics and mug their way through this extremely disappointing sequel to the 2000 hit. Yet as H. L. Mencken famously quipped, "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." And Meet the Fockers proved the late curmudgeon right several times over.
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Meet the Parents covered the dread of meeting the in-laws as personified by De Niro's intimidating ex-CIA agent father in-law. Meet the Fockers is more about the embarrassment of introducing people you care about to your own eccentric family. And who can't relate to that? Who hasn't dreaded that their mom will drag out the old family photo album complete with the ghosts of bad hairdos past? Of course this movie takes it to the extreme when accompanying a photo of Gaylord's circumcision, is a piece of his foreskin saved in the album.
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It's a toss-up as to who gets the worst end of the deal with Meet the Fockers: the audience or the film's all-star cast. Fans of Meet the Parents expecting more of the same broad, manic comedy will get it, all right, only this time the laugh quotient is surprisingly low. The gleefully nasty humor of the first film falls by the wayside, replaced by loud, cartoonish shtick that plays on tired ethnic stereotypes and obvious gags. As for the film's above-the-title stars, they sink to the script's sitcom-level antics and mug their way through this extremely disappointing sequel to the 2000 hit.
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[I]t's not so important whether Meet the Fockers is as funny as Meet the Parents. Roach isn't just trying to make you laugh, even though he does so frequently. Despite all the comments in others' reviews about sex-oriented humor (how could you not expect that in a film with a title like this?), or general "low-brow" humor, the comic situations here are more sophisticated in many ways than a typical "outrageous" comedy. That means that you're not going to laugh out loud, with tears streaming down your face, as often as you're going to be sitting there with a big smile on your face watching scenarios such as Bernie trying, and mostly succeeding, to hold on to his hippie ideals no matter what the short term costs. This is more a humor of slightly exaggerated but realistic folly, played fabulously by a stellar cast.
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The duo played a role in shepherding such hits as "The Fast and the Furious," "A Beautiful Mind," "Meet the Parents," "The Bourne Identity," "Bruce Almighty," "Bring It On" and "Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas." They supervised more than 90 films, 21 of which made more than $100 million apiece at the boxoffice.
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Meet The Parents