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Meet the Fockers Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG-13 (for crude and sexual humor, language and a brief drug reference) Theater release: December 22, 2010 by Universal Pictures Directed by: Jay Roach Runtime: 1 hour 54 minutes Cast: Ben Stiller (Greg Focker), Robert De Niro (Jack Byrnes), Dustin Hoffman (Bernie Focker), Barbra Streisand (Roz Focker), Blythe Danner (Dina Byrnes), Teri Polo (Pam Byrnes), Owen Wilson (Kevin Rawley) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Meet the Parents was an almost painfully funny comedy about a man who meets his fiancée's family for the first time and proceeds to embarrass himself in every way possible. In Meet the Fockers—so called because that is the man's family name—the man's own two parents enter the picture, with even more embarrassing results; but this time, despite a fairly strong start, there are times when the comedy is not that funny, just painful.

Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand play Greg Focker's hippie-esque parents

The new film also has much more crude humor than I remember the first one having. True, the first film did get a fair bit of mileage out of the fact that Greg Focker (Ben Stiller), real name Gaylord, had a surname that allowed the filmmakers to indulge in more naughty jokes of a certain sort than would normally be possible in a PG-13 film if one vowel were ever-so-slightly different—and there is plenty more of that in the sequel, too.

But whereas the earlier film was about a basically decent but rather neurotic klutz squirming under the glare of his very traditional, controlling father-in-law-to-be, the new film reveals that Greg's parents are extremely liberal and open-minded children of the '60s for whom, it seems, no subject is too private to discuss. Bernie (Dustin Hoffman) is a retired lawyer and former stay-at-home dad who greets his future in-laws with remarks about his missing testicle, and Roz (Barbra Streisand) is a sex therapist for seniors whose office is filled with suggestive paraphernalia, who quizzes Greg on his sex life, and who doesn't take too long to conclude that Greg's future parents-in-law may need a little help in the bedroom.

Blythe Danner and Robert De Niro return as Pam's parents, Jack and Dina Byrnes

Jack Byrnes (Robert De Niro), the former CIA man whose daughter Pam (Teri Polo) happens to be Greg's intended, is an uptight, conservative sort and does not take too kindly to, say, the way Greg's parents openly discuss how they encouraged him to lose his virginity to their sexy Hispanic housekeeper (Alanna Ubach) when he was a teen. But Jack has a few odd quirks of his own. Jack and his wife Dina (Blythe Danner) are looking after their other daughter's infant son, and Jack, to avoid "confusing" the babe, feeds him not with a bottle, but through a prosthetic breast designed to exactly resemble that of the child's mother. Of course, when Jack proudly tells Greg to touch his invention, someone walks in.

Jack Byrnes (De Niro) doesn't look to thrilled with Bernie's (Hoffman) show of affection

Imitation cuss words, imitation nudity—as much as this film may push the envelope, it's still quite funny, and the crassness is quite tolerable, at first, because the humor is rooted in fairly believable and likable characters. As one who is in the midst of planning a wedding myself, I found it very easy to sympathize with Greg, whose nervousness around Jack is matched only by his frustration with his own folks. When Greg discovers that the Byrneses, who were expecting a simple meeting of parents, are about to be swamped by an impromptu gathering of dozens of Jewish relatives, I had to smile; my own in-laws-to-be have marveled at the sheer number of Mennonites on my side of the equation.

It is also amusing to see how the film explains Greg's neuroses by filling in his own family background. Fans of The Incredibles will be amused to hear Jack echo a much-discussed line from that film when he complains that the Focker parents are "celebrating mediocrity" by keeping Greg's ninth-place ribbons on a trophy wall. As Roz, Streisand—in her first non-directing, non-producing acting gig since 1981's All Night Long—spills secrets and peppers her lines with Yiddish slang, while Hoffman, as Bernie, creates a charmingly complex character whose '60s values express themselves in ways that can be mature and parental, even stern on occasion, but can also be immature and downright adolescent.

Greg (Ben Stiller) and Pam (Teri Polo) are the engaged couple in the middle of this mess

However, somewhere around the hour-and-a-half mark, the film begins to lose me, as the humor starts to go beyond mere embarrassment humor and into territory that some might think would be deeply psychologically scarring to the people involved. The first film's famous lie-detector scene was funny, but not too intrusive; you could easily imagine Greg and Jack going on to plan a wedding together after that experience. But in the new film, Jack goes so far as to jab a needle full of truth serum into Greg's neck—and this, in turn, is related to a subplot involving a boy who has never known who his father is. And then there is the quick, throwaway gag involving a Child Support Services worker who takes Jack's grandson away. Somehow, it isn't quite so easy to take these things in stride.

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