Meet the Parents : Little Fockers

Review by Anthony Morris

It's a truly rare and special type of film that has you leaving the cinema wondering what just happened. 

The question "What was the point of all that" is always easy to answer, because the point is always the same : money.

Little Fockers is that rare film which doesn't actually seem to have any real point to it at all, it's like a bunch of Hollywood types figured "Hey, those Meet the Fockers characters are so popular and interesting I bet we could get people to go see 90 minutes of them just going through their daily lives".

There are (what seem to be) bits and pieces of story floating around : Jack (Robert DeNiro) has a minor heart attack and tells Greg (Ben Stiller) he has to be the man of the family, leading to the bubbling Greg to "get his act together". But then what?

Nothing it seems.

What follows is a seemingly never-ending parade of cameos, with every single cast member from the previous films (Owen Wilson, Barbara Striesand, Dustin Hoffman) returning. 

In fact, there are so many guest appearances to shoe-horn in that for the first half hour or so (in which Stiller does nothing but take phone calls) Little Fockers turns into one of those "Direct-to-DVD" films.

You know the type, where the big name cast members each have one scene that doesn't actually feature them in the same room with anyone else (so they can all be filmed separately).

Dustin Hoffman was famously brought in after the film had wrapped production to film new scenes (charging a significant fee to do so).

Eventually people start to clump together so we can get deathless comedy moments like Jack suffering from a never-ending erection (he just takes erection medication he finds lying around) leading to Greg having to inject his penis with a blood thinner

Of course - one of the kids opens the door at exactly the wrong moment! Comedy!

Actually, pretty much the entire "comedy" aspect of this film is built around people opening the door at the wrong moment; if you open the door to a cinema showing this, you'll understand the feeling.

1 out of 5

Meet the Parents : Little Fockers
Australian release: 26th December, 2010
Official Site: Meet the Parents : Little Fockers
Cast: Robert De Niro, Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Blythe Danner, Teri Polo, Jessica Alba, Laura Dern, Harvey Keitel, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand
Director: Paul Weitz