Meet the Fockers

Meet the Fockers (Director: Jay Roach)

Roach may have the most interesting box office track record of all directors working today. He helmed Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, which wasn't a huge hit until it went to video, and it sprung two sequels (that he directed) that went on to huge box office draws. After The Spy Who Shagged Me, Roach directed Meet the Parents which became a huge hit and spawned this sequel. So, Roach has four films on his resume that are incredible hits, and this one will be his fifth, and...what is the man's style, exactly? Comedy directors are rarely considered in the film world with the stuffy film term auteur.

I mean, isn't it safe to say that no one came to Austin Powers thinking, "A Jay Roach film?" More like " A Mike Myers film." And Meet the Parents had that unusual combo of Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller in some pop-comedic situations in which audiences were drawn. He's never written or contributed (at least credited) to these screenplays. He seems to be a man who actors like to work with, and maybe that's the best complement that Roach gets. Maybe that's all he wants. His one box office dud was Mystery, Alaska, which I've not seen, but involved A-lister Russell Crowe as a hockey player who leads a small town's team against the New York Rangers in an exhibition.

Meet the Fockers opens on December 22.

And here's the rub: this movie sinks at one point under the weight of Robert De Niro's character Jack Byrnes, a retired CIA agent who, in the last film, gave future son-in-law Gaylord "Greg" Focker (Stiller) the third degree in measuring his suitability for his daughter Pam (Teri Polo). After all that was learned in the first film, Jack finds a reason to be an asshole again, and so much so that the movie turns into a disturbing, Taxi Driver revisitation for De Niro. Not that the movie is spoofing Taxi Driver or The King of Comedy or any other of De Niro's psycho stalker roles, which would have been funny. The tone of the film is just so...eerie. De Niro goes from loveable misguided soul to villain at one point, and I would wager to say that the film does an impossible about-face to take him from the dark side.

In the middle of all this, the Fockers are played with brilliance by scene-stealers Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand, playing the looney, open-minded offset to the Byrnes couple (completed by Blythe Danner). Basically, they are the reason to watch the movie, although some of the words given them sound like the film is taking a potshot at conservatives. You know, the hippie liberals are so much more fun and open-minded than a couple of staunch conservatives, and despite their idiosyncrasies they're always right. And in this movie, they are, since the portrayal of the Byrnes is so ridiculously shallow. Ultimately, the subtext is that liberals need to "save" conservatives, or convert them.

The other subtext would be the Jewish culture clashing with the Christian culture, which you can infer the same things from the paragraph above.

Ultimately, is it funny? I must say the laughs were hard to come by in scenes where Hoffman and Streisand weren't present. They will be enough for most audiences to say it was a good movie. There's another farcical scene with Stiller where everything that could go wrong, does, a la the "cat escape" scene from the first film. There's a scene in the middle of the eerie, psycho-scariness that would have been funnier if it had been somewhere else. There's a revelation towards the end of the film concering a major plot point that I found to be the funniest gag in the entire movie. All in all, this movie could have been decent, but only had the movie not resorted to the over-the-top drama.