2 out of 10
 

The Fockers in your wallet

I went to this movie expecting it to be funny, having seen the excellent "Meet The Parents." Starring Dustin Hoffman and Barbara Streisand, I didn't think they could mess it up. Sadly it appears, in this unfunny over-the-top sequel, the producers have just shoved in a few extra top actors, but run with exactly the same script, regurgitating the same scenes from the first, this time adding eternally unfunny nephew who could have been better played by Jinx, Jack Byrne's beloved cat.

In this version, Pam Byrne takes her parents to meet her fiancé Greg Focker's folks with her father Jack deciding to drive them in an RV to the ranch style southern US home. With a nasty nephew on board and lame jokes about milking appearing from the start, it quickly takes a turn for the worse.

Hoffman plays Bernie Focker, a retired stay-at-home lawyer, who seems to spend the entire film sitting around, pretending to be Dustin Hoffman in retirement, as does Streisand as Greg's mother Roz Focker, pretending to be an aged Barbra Streisand looking for a cheque as fat as her bloated stomach. Roz has been written as a sex councilor even though cheap gags about sex and therapists died out in the 1960's and in this new millennium, it causes not a raised eyebrow, yet the message seems totally lost on the writing team.

Set in Florida, but filmed in California, it reeked of what little budget there was being used to provide a big salary for Hoffman and Streisand to put an authorizing stamp to this utter tripe. For a family comedy, it contained a shocking level of racial stereotypes, as just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, the whole movie nosedives with the appearance of Isabel Villalobos, the appauling housekeeper, her son Jorge and a whole panacea of unfunny Hispanic American gags.

"Meet The Fockers" is summed up perfectly by one its writers, John Hamburg (a close associate of Ben Stiller) who openly confessed to NBC about one of his previous releases: "I managed to fool a lot of people. You know, I'm very good at lying and cheating my way through meetings and I got a studio to give me a lot of money to make this movie."
…spoken like a true Focker!