Overall Rating
  Awesome: 21.46%
Worth A Look: 40%
Average: 14.63%
Pretty Bad: 20.49%
Total Crap: 3.41%
15 reviews, 115 user ratings
|
|
| Meet the Parents |
by Greg Muskewitz
"The distorted humor actually begins to be painful."
|
Don’t you hate it when you laugh at something on your initial reaction even though it maybe something that really was funny to you and others, but when you think back on it, you kind of feel sorry for the person it happened to? Well, that’s the gist I had with the slapsticky, gaggy, but still funny Meet the Parents. The situations were funny and easily risible, though somewhat ribald, but after a point it started to almost be a little depressing.The ever-willing to be embarrassed in any way possible Ben Stiller plays Greg Focker (yes, that’s what it sounds like, and expect to hear it a lot!), a nice-guy nurse who’s in love with Pam (Teri Polo) a kindergarten teacher. He’s ready to propose, and even has the students in on it, but when Greg overhears a telephone conversation about how her dad wants to be notified first, he puts his plans on hold. After all, Pam’s sister is getting married in a few weeks, and she and Greg are going to visit them in New York for the weekend. It should provide the perfect opportunity for Greg to “pop the question” to her dad first.
Pam’s dad to Greg’s knowledge is a retired florist, but if you’ve seen the previews you should already know that it isn’t true. But for the time being, the cat isn’t out of the bag, but as Greg and Pam leave Chicago and arrive in NY, Greg’s suitcase is lost. It’s only the start for him of things to go wrong. Pam’s father, Jack Byrnes (Robert De Niro) and mother Dina (Blythe Danner) are the animated soon-to-be in-laws you really don’t want to be tied to.
From the start, Jack isn’t very fond of Greg. Jack’s set back in his ways and wants it kept that way (“Make sure you keep that snake locked in its cage for 72 hours. It’s my way, or the Long Island Fairway.”). Dina putters around, slightly off her rocker, but is still a likable presence. No matter what angle you look at it from, Greg is cursed with bad luck, whether it be his “disliking” of cats, his unsturdy stories, or anything else he does, he cannot win Jack’s favor. Everything is always going wrong! It makes a turn for the worse (just when you thought it couldn’t get any more so) when the other daughter Debbie (Nicole DeHuff) and her fiancée come in for the rehearsals. Not to mention when the cat is let out of the bag (and out of the house) when Pam tells Greg her father was in the CIA for 35 years, explaining the polygraph tests Jack gave him. (“I was afraid of your father when he was a florist, and now I’ve gotta CIA tracker on my ass!”)
Stiller is a good actor; I’m usually pleased to see him pop up in some quirky roles and films. Yet he seems to have a penchant for taking roles where his characters are just decimated by humiliation. It makes a good source of laughs for sure, and it allows you to do it for the most part without feeling guilty. For example, there was There’s Something About Mary, Mystery Men, Your Friends and Neighbors, The Zero Effect and Flirting with Disaster just to name a few of the roles where he is utterly vanquished into Embarrassment Hell forever. Again, Meet the Parents is another excruciating role for Stiller –his poor role of Greg goes through so much stuff just to enable the audience to laugh. This time though, I did feel a bit guilty for laughing. The gags and situations, courtesy of a cruel, but well-tuned script by John Herzfeld and John Hamburg provide plenty of clever elements (“Oh no! I just remembered Pam’s Middle name”/ “What, Martha?”/ “Uh huh”/ “Oh!! Pam Martha Focker!”), but it almost goes overboard with Greg –we wish for more of a vindication for him at the end.
It was nice to see De Niro in a lighter, more relaxed role. His talents are unquestionable, so every once and awhile it’s good to see him kick off the boots and give comedy his treatment. And his method, of playing it straight with an unforced, deliberately cocky aura works to his advantage. Whether he’s playing it like that, or iconoclastically like in Analyze This, it works well. Danner, who’s still busily working, but without much notice (living in the shadow of her daughter, Gwyneth Paltrow), is also amusing, but in a more limited, slightly annoying way. She lays it on a little too heavily on occasion making the character role a bit over-animated compared to the rest who don’t need it.
The majority of the rest of the cast are all pretty new. Polo has an attractive quality, but although she does well here, she blends in and vanishes afterwards. She doesn’t present anything unique or unusual other actors don’t have to offer. James Rebhorn (Snow Falling on Cedars) doesn’t fare so hot with the script, and Jon Abrahams (Scary Movie) has an under-developed role as the Byrnes’ son, Danny.
Jay Roach, the director behind the Austin Powers movies, and the hockey-sleeper movie last year, Mystery, Alaska knows how to take a concept and run with it. Roach picks good scripts to work with, and in the case of what he’s directed so far, they’re good comedies without anything above average in the thinking department. The Austin Powers movies worked more for Myers and his gags rather than the direction, but Roach still had a handle on it. Meet the Parents doesn’t go beyond goofy humor and gags, but it’s easy to follow along with and it is easy to laugh at. Whether you feel for him or not at the end, Greg Focker, poor Greg Focker, will at least have made you laugh.Final Verdict: B.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=3916&reviewer=172
originally posted: 10/11/00 16:02:17
![[printer]](/images/icon/printer.gif) printer-friendly format
|
Trilogy Starters: For more in the Trilogy Starters series, click here.
|
 |
USA
06-Oct-2000 (PG-13)
DVD: 14-Dec-2004
UK
N/A
Australia
26-Dec-2000 (M)
|
|
Articles 
subscribe to this feed![[AllPosters.com]](/images/icon/ap.gif){kind=icon}
