Meet the Fockers

What’s the Story?

After winning the approval of his fiancee Pam (Teri Polo)'s parents in Meet the Parents, Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) invites the straightlaced Byrnes family to meet his own eccentric family in MEET THE FOCKERS. Everyone -- including super-programmed grandchild Jack-Jack -- hops into Jack (Robert DeNiro)'s super-fitted RV and head to Florida, where they meet Greg's parents (Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman) -- the kind of people for whom the term "boundary issues" was created.

Is It Any Good?

This movie reprises many jokes from the first movie as well of some of its own. There is a slight but viable joke in the very beginning of the movie, when Greg has to leave a voicemail for his parents and ends up waiting through their incompetent answering machine recording, not realizing that they had not turned it off so including some very personal material. But within the next 15 minutes, the joke is repeated two more times. That still leaves time for plenty of attention to Greg's mother Roz, a sex therapist. But most of all, this is about how Greg, instead of being embarrassed about his fears of his own inadequacy, he is embarrassed about the external representation of those fears -- his parents.

Everyone tries hard. They all but climb down out of the screen. Hoffman kisses everyone, sits on the toilet while DeNiro is in the shower, moonwalks, and spreads whipped cream over Streisand's breasts. DeNiro wears a prosthetic breast called a "man-ary gland." It doesn't have whipped cream, but it does have breast milk pumped through it so his grandchild will feel that his mother is nursing him. Blythe Danner asks Streisand for sex tips. And Stiller has to stand before a trophy wall that displays his 9th place ribbons, his bar mitzvah tallit, and his high school jock strap. It sounded like the audience laughed at these items more because they wanted to find it funny than because they actually did.