There’s very little in Meet the Parents (2000 version…or 1992 for that matter) that suggests a franchise. As a one-off exploration of a single, specific event in one’s life (meeting your girlfriend’s parents), it was complete. Ah hah!, but also astoundingly successful. And with the little sequel-baiting line towards Parents’ end, about meeting the parents on the other side, well…Even as a joke, one doesn’t propose sequels lightly in a film’s ending. Such things lead to Back to the Future Part II (not a wholly awful result).
So, Meet the Parents 2 – no, wait, excuse me, Meet the FOCKERS, you see, for that reminds folk of that central over-used cuss word joke from the first – So, Meet the FOCKERS occurred 4 years later, a rather lengthy delay really, but such is possibly the challenge of getting MVPs Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro back together, what with schedules and all (what with Stiller being silly, and De Niro well into his prolific “just don’t give a crap” phase). And director Jay Roach returns too, meaning he needed to fart out the remainder of those Austin Powers movies first, while people still maintained the slightest degree of goodwill towards Mike Meyers.
The real challenge postponing Fockers was finding those ever-important Fockers, parents of Stiller’s immortal male nurse, Gaylord “Greg” Focker. Like that name, eh? Ya can’t recount Fockers without going Focker Focker Focker! (It’s the movie’s favorite joke, to no one’s shock. Focker!) And as De Niro’s Jack Byrnes was the WASP taskmaster par excellence, twas essential to find an equivalent pair of shrill, liberal Jews for the Focker homestead. Finding famous Jews in Hollywood?! That’ll be hard!
To their credit, the cast is great…on paper. Dustin Hoffman leads the new crew, as Bernie Focker. Not bad, as the man represents a certain generation of respected actors just as much as De Niro does (and has become just as lazy in his autumn years). Then, as Roz Focker (Focker Focker Focker!), they got Barbara Streisand, a notable coup as she’d apparently ceased acting entirely by then. But the draw of being a famous Focker, who could resist, eh? (Get it yet? “Focker” sounds like “Fucker,” but the MPAA can’t do anything about it. Oh the ribaldry!)
Focker!
Those two new big name stars are certainly the reason why the $55 million original jumped up to $80 million now, it being a supremely trying technical shoot, what with its one house setting and everything. (That’s, like, 5.5 Crouching Tigers, Hidden Dragons, or fucking 160 Halloweens!) A thought occurs: Jay Roach is a poor moneyman.
Without Greg Glienna’s witty original to pilfer now (apart from one-off gags, now mistold), returning screenwriting ubermenschen Jim Herzfeld and John Hamburg have to construct a scenario from whole cloth. And that’s without the universality of Meet the Parents’ parent-meeting premise. Oh sure, parents are met here, but future in-laws meeting doesn’t carry the same basicness as a girlfriend’s parents. Or maybe it’s because I’ve only done the latter myself.
So minus that promising notion to build upon, or Glienna’s good gaggery (for whatever damned reason, the true franchise mastermind has never been invited to do anything for the big budget efforts), Fockers simply goes the juvenile route. There were surely hints of this approach in Parents, with cats shitting and all, but Fockers seems simply an exercise to examine as many scatological, sexual, and otherwise off-putting notions as possible within the PG-13 rating (even the title plays into this). It becomes arbitrary, a cartoon, where Parents worked best because there was some truth to the awkward scenario it told. It’s as though the filmmakers simply listed out a number of scenes they wanted to do, then tried fashioning a scant narrative around them.
Add to that the exaggeration of the characters this time around. Jack Byrnes, that amalgamation of all the world’s worst fathers-in-law, has become nothing less than conservatism writ large, a mass of all the post-9/11 security mentalities and sexual inhibitions. This is needed because the Fockers have been carefully created to be the complete opposites of Jack in every way: liberal to a fault, essentially fucking everywhere they can at all times, emotionally open, it goes on. (Roz is even taken to uttering Jewish clichés at every turn, because to other Jews, this is apparently hilarious. As a Gentile, I’m at a loss…)
In Fockers, nothing is realistic, both sides simply cartoons of themselves. One no longer sees real families here, but bad walking gags performed well. Add to that the puerility, which never shocks as a combined result of the limited rating and its calculated nature, and Fockers’ focus falters.
Consider: Greg is taking Jack and Dina (oh, right, Blythe Danner is in all these, herself as forgotten as Polo) to Miami to meet his Focked up family. Desperate to impress Jack, with marriage to Pam imminent in Greg’s mind, he convinces his parents to hide their serial-fucking ways for the weekend. In the approach Parents employed, this would indeed happen, the nature of the Fockers emerging as a slow burn over time. Fockers’ Fockers are not that way. Their first scene pretty much demolishes those notions entirely, leaving Fockers to simply follow its depressing panoply of gross-out moments for a surprisingly overlong run time, then work out some stuff involving Greg towards the end so the usual unearned cloying ending can come about like clockwork.
Maybe it’s advisable to summarize Fockers as a mere list of vulgarities, for that’s clearly what it was for the disinterested people behind the camera:
There is a one-year-old baby, Little Jack, with a breast obsession. So whenever a big-boobed character is on screen, cue cutaways to the child cupping its hands and overacting like Jerry Lewis. It’s “funny” because he’s pre-sexual (and pre-verbal). As to whose baby this is, well, it’s Deb and Bob’s, newlyweds from Part One who don’t even appear in this movie at all. But their baby is there, for some exceedingly poorly exposited reasons (they’re in Thailand doing whatever), mostly because the filmmakers wanted an excuse to do some baby jokes.
And that baby’s age, etc., indicates it’s been at least 2 years since the events of Parents (in-film, that is; it’s been 4 years in actuality, for as odd as Teri Polo now looks). That means, despite his previous proposal, Greg’s been waiting 2 years to marry Pam, with the wedding still six months away. All these factoids vomited out so we can accept the central notion, that this’ll play as much like the first as possible, only with more Fockers.
But right, I got sidetracked from a listing of filthiness…
Focker!
Jack has invented a false wearable breast, a “manary gland” in fact, so he can breastfeed young Little Jack. The excuse given is Jack’s obsessive Ferber Method – for Jack is the kind of anal retentive who plans everything to the nth degree, which is why it’s so easy for Greg to inadvertently foil his schemes again and again. This is a Jack so sexually uptight, he’s probably only had sex three times (as evidenced by his three children). This emotionally constipated Jack wears a molded, lifelike breast on a regular basis, for weakly-stated reasons – because they had another boob joke they wanted to squeeze in, as it were.
Then when we meet Bernie Focker, he talks at length about having only one testicle. How this Jew can avoid referencing Hitler, who’s to say?
Roz’s profession, meanwhile, is as a sex therapist to the elderly. The general fact of this is to allow her an excuse to elaborate upon sex at length at any given moment (not inherently a problem, but when it’s all been constructed merely for the lulz, forgive me from not tittering like a schoolboy). In the short term, though, it’s a chance for a sight gag involving numerous old people dry humping each other, because old people having sex = teh funnies.
Briefly, Bernie indicates to everybody that he regularly does not flush his feces. Nice.
At the dinner table, Greg’s parents feel the need to prattle on at length about his botched circumcision. Because unrelated dialogue separates portions of this discussion, is gives the movie MPAA deniability to then describe Greg’s deformed penis at length, with artful metaphors involving turtles, helmets, you know, common penile terms. It’s brazen, but not clever. It’s no “South Park.”
As a break from penis time, the Fockers elaborate upon Greg’s loss of his virginity, which happened at 19 to their housekeeper Isabelle (Alanna Ubach). This apparently happened back in Detroit, but Isabelle and her big boobs are here in Miami now to, er, titillate Little Jack. There’s greater importance to Isabelle, but for now it’s just another random bit of distaste.
Then it’s back to the penis! For Roz has saved Greg’s mangled, dried-out old foreskin in a book all these years, because that’s who the Fockers are. Just like all families, right?! The foreskin finds its way into the fondue (bris in the brie)…You know, screw PG-13, this movie is one step away from Dead Alive! I find the gleeful, disgusting puke sequences of something like The Meaning of Life hilarious, but this is just witless and gross!
Little Jack maybe says his first word. Oh no, it was just a fart. Got that function checked off the list!
Oh, I nearly forgot, the Fockers have themselves a humping dog, Moses! The sex-happy mutt’s main function is to supply random visual gags when nothing else overtly awful is on hand.
The dog is also there to act as a foe to Jinx, because of course Mr. LJ “Jinxy,” Jack’s prized Himalayan, has come down to Florida, it being the prime source of bowel jokes in Part One. In a moment more slapstick than foul, the dog and cat duel like Looney Tunes in Jack’s RV, which is also there. The dog is flushed down the toilet (sans feces, thank the Heavens), which is almost amusing, because…Glienna’s 1992 version included a dog drowning. This is likely a pilfering of that.
Otherwise, eventually the animals make their peace – through fornication. Moses, the hump-master, actively sodomizes Mr. Jinx in front of the baby, and likely plants an unwanted seed that would later bloom in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Not good.
The elder Fockers have incredibly loud, long, boisterous foreplay involving whipped cream and Barbara Streisand’s various genitalia. Because it remains off screen, and mostly in unsubtle double entendre (“rug” and “lawn” = too sideways for the MPAA to grasp), it passes in this movie…I just figured out where the $80 million went! Bribing the censors!
As a break, Roz takes Dina aside for conversation. She says both “sperm” and “semen,” which again isn’t a problem, except we’re so obviously meant to laugh at those words’ utterances, as though we were all 13-year-olds shoving our fingers through our zippers in the classroom.
Back to the illicit dog-cat interspecies fuck fest. As this goes on, the baby gets its hands on a bottle of rum, and also watches Scarface. This is just comedic flailing, an assortment of “risqué” things to involve a baby in, plopped down in the film without sensibility. And this is the moment that gets Greg back in Jack’s bad graces (making me think the movie was more over than it was, the damnably long thing!), so too bad it wasn’t more believable.
Okay, now Little Jack has learned his first word, and it isn’t flatulence. No, it’s the cuss word studies show can be uttered indefinitely in a PG-13 movie, with no repercussions, allowing repetition ad nauseum: “asshole.” A baby saying “asshole.” Consistently for the next 40 minutes. Wit.
Also, they’d planned a scene where Barbara Streisand “massages” Robert De Niro, in a way which mostly resembles back sodomy. There’s no ultimate point to this scene, or explanation for it, so it’s perfectly at home in Fockers.
The climax nears, and plot rears. Jack suspects Greg may have sired a child with Isabelle 15 years ago – Jorge, the most Ben Stiller-looking Latino in the world. At a beach house soiree filled with “dancing Fockers,” Jack clues Greg in on this. But this isn’t enough, though. To ensure Greg tells the truth, Jack injects him with a truth serum that –
Okay, hold on! Focker!
Jack’s former CIA profession came up in Meet the Parents, where it was mostly treated as a calculated exaggeration of the dreaded father-in-law. This job served a purpose there, allowing for some slightly less believable jokes about polygraph machines and the like as a result. But in Fockers, where there isn’t such a focus, Jack’s job is merely another cartoon detail. Consider, we’ve already seen a high-tech hideaway underneath the bed in his RV, a control station to make any Bond villain envious. This serves no purpose, but to prepare audiences for the poorly-crafted world where truth serums can be broken out with as much ease as in Kill Bill, Vol. 2.
The result, once Greg is hopped up on the plot juice, is to go Liar Liar, which is doubly painful considering this franchise’s one-time flirtation with Jim Carrey. It is profoundly not funny, and Stiller’s everyman disappears behind a veil of Carrey-esque mannerisms which totally do not suit the actor. (Here they can check off all those naughty topics so far untouched, such as masturbation.)
With this “highlight,” Meet the Fockers goes the way of all mainstream comedies, and becomes an unfunny and just plain bad drama at the end. Despite a preoccupation with the butt and the cock and the nipple, Fockers wishes to be heartwarming and reassuring, so people leave feeling “good.” Ugh! mainstream humor! That means everyone must love each other at the end…at least, until another sequel resets that.
Somewhat uniquely, the main arc this time is Jack’s, as it is clear he’s been the major asshole the whole time (as Little Jack points out). He drives off alone in the RV, as Greg and Bernie rush to recreate the conditions for Parents’ finale. And because it’s now after 9/11, and badmouthing the airline industry is no longer acceptable, they have a contextless and aggression-filled run-in with a traffic cop. This leads to tazing humor, and Meet the Fockers reminds me how bad this stuff normally is, and how amazing it is that The Hangover handled the same joke with such aplomb (now that is how you do a potty joke movie!).
These events lead to Jack, Greg and Bernie all behind bars, mostly because that’s how world-class farce Bringing Up Baby climaxed. Never mind that’s the worst part of Bringing Up Baby, people still feel the need to recreate it, for its “energy.” So now Jack and Greg have that heart-to-heart we knew was coming. There was much rejoicing.
Just to assure filmdom’s longest non-Pirates of the Caribbean engagement period come to an end, they conclude with Greg and Pam’s wedding. Weddings always work to soothe the sappier audience members, which make up the majority of viewers for a middlebrow effort like this. As one final joke, the presiding minister is Owen Wilson (it wouldn’t be a Ben Stiller joint otherwise…), who performs much of the ceremony in Hebrew, simply because – again – anything Jewish is supposedly automatically funny to others of the Jewish persuasion. What is that all about?
I critique Meet the Fockers for having no voice, for playing like a Frank Capra movie at the end even while it has the urge to be “Family Guy” for much of its running. This mustn’t have been a problem to the general public, however, because for whatever thoroughly unfathomable reason, Fockers almost doubled the box office take of its predecessor, taking in half a billion dollars! Astounding, as I know nobody who’s seen this movie! (Whereas my friends can quote underperformers like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.)
The thing about most filmgoers is that they are not film lovers, not in the sense of people who rewrite The Big Lebowski into Shakespearean verse. They do not seek out a film for its longevity, or rewatchability. They simply want something that’ll go down easy, entertain well enough, not challenge them in any significant way. This is the same mentality which rewards things like Grown Ups (hell, Adam Sandler as a whole – his artsy efforts aside), which shuns experiments such as Grindhouse. This is angering. But enough of this Focking movie! I’m off to the cinema, to watch – shudder! – Little Fockers. May this all end for me soon.
Focker!
Related posts:
• No. 2 Meet the Parents (2000)
• No. 4 Little Fockers (2010)
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