Review: Little Fockers

Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson have made quite a large body of movies together. Little Fockers, the latest entry in the Meet the Parents series is, well, it's another of them. The 2000 movie Meet the Parents was a fun, if not high-brow, examination of the tribulations when in-laws meet for the first time. Meet the Fockers, in 2004, continued with the established formula of "Jack doesn't trust Greg, Jack spies on Greg, Jack takes things out of context, Step 3 PROFIT." But at least it added Dustin Hoffman and Barbara Streisand as Greg's wonderfully zany, new-age sex-therapist title-card parents. This latest entry in the series throws any pretense out the window that the movieis about anything other than the love story between Stiller's Greg Focker and Robert De Niro's Jack Byrnes.

Except for the family name, it would have been more descriptive to call this entry in the series "Little Afterthoughts." The Focker children serve only as the vehicle for getting Stiller and De Niro to fight, like a set of parents embroiled in divorce proceedings. Little Samantha Focker (Daisy Tahan) is drawn to and takes on the personality of her grandpa Jack while Henry Focker (Colin Baiocchi) is hinted to have a genetic "double dose of Focker."

But those characterizations are both incidental, since the kids are present in no more than 5 percent of Little Fockers. Instead, we see the setup of Focker-Byrnes machinations as Jack attempts to keep the fact of his heart attack under cover, while Greg continues to be the all-around good guy, just trying to make a living for his family and keep everyone happy. Jessica Alba comes along for the ride as a vampy pharmaceutical rep who upsets the situation as she maneuvers Greg into more and more compromising positions that he's just too nice to get out of.

Throw in some embarrassing mentions on Greg's mother Roz's (Barbra Streisand) live TV Sex show, some last-minute help from dad Bernie (Dustin Hoffman) and every possible punnish reference you can think of (Gay Focker has become God Focker) and you could easily make ten more of these little fockers as long as the actors will keep doing them. (Which may not be long, as it is rumored Hoffman refused at first to take the part over disagreement with the script. We don't blame him.)

Streisand and Hoffman's peripheral roles here actually stand out as entertaining, if only because they provide a break from the Greg-Jack schtick, likewise with Owen Wilson. Just one scene with De Niro and screen wife Blythe Danner exhibits a tender moment between the couple that is worth of the name De Niro. Otherwise, his character is entirely insane with paranoia and unfortunately, not in a funny way.

While Little Fockers isn't the worst movie of the year, this cookie-cutter sequel will barely be remembered by the time they release the inevitable sequel, Grand Fockers or Bud Fockers or Teen Fockers. God help us.