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Little Fockers
We’ve already met the parents, we’ve met the Fockers, and now we get to
meet yet another dysfunctional addition to the Ben Stiller and Robert De
Niro franchise – Meet the Parents: Little Fockers. With a lack of new
comic material, Little Fockers tries to compensate through a cast of
familiar faces including the likes of Harvey Keitel, Jessica Alba and
even Deepak Chopra, fluctuating between crude jokes and touching family
messages that projectile-vomit predictability and disappointment in your
face.
Like any parent will know, kids change everything. But in the case of
Little Fockers, the kids don’t change things so much as exist as gags
within an unoriginal plot, screaming at penile injections and letting
their pet lizards crawl into messy situations. For Greg (Stiller),
parenthood is just added pressure from his father-in-law, Jack (De
Niro), who questions Greg’s capability in being the ‘Godfocker’ of his
ever-extending family tree when suspicions arise that Greg is having an
affair with a hot drug representative (Alba) at his hospital. Of course,
this enables Jack to return to his obsessive surveillance (“I’m watching
you” apparently never gets old) and fire up some family quarrels
regarding whether Greg is a good enough father and husband. As Greg has
to try and prove his worth before his marriage is destroyed completely,
misunderstandings and wrong-time-wrong-place humour take up majority of
this tedious flick.
While no one should be expecting a highly original plotline, it is the
quality of the comedy that really lets us down. Despite the occasional
laughs created by Owen Wilson, Little Fockers doesn’t really take full
advantage of its great cameo appearances as the movie becomes too
preoccupied with Greg and Jack’s cat-and-mouse game of catching out
Greg’s inadequacies, even though this issue has been covered adequately
in the past two films. As a result, Little Fockers becomes less about
the children and more about the sexual frustrations and difficulties of
the parents who try so hard to impress crazy in-laws, reverting back to
older and fewer jokes that are weakly revived through physical mishaps
and smart talk. In the end, Little Fockers tries to touch on family
values to get the “awww” factor out of Jack and Greg’s relationship but
ultimately fails to win us over as confusion is cleared up too easily,
conflict is reconciled over one show-down and difficult relationships
get sorted overnight.
The special features on the DVD, however, include an alternative opening
and ending to the film that are starkly different to what ended up being
used for the final cut, along with a gag reel that isn’t any funnier
than the film, but more amusing to watch.
As just another threequel that fails to live up to the glory days of its
first instalment, Little Fockers does little with what it has, choosing
to take a predictable route that is made even more disappointing by the
lack of humorous new characters and relationships so that even the
comical intent of the surname ‘focker’ has gotten too old. |
