Cast your mind back to the dark and dreary winter days of 2000. Sonia was our Silver Surfer down under, Bush’s presidential hopes held tight with a new jam, Gore tight with the mic in the left hand, and the Celtic Tiger was purring on a sheepskin rug in front of a roaring fire. Oh, how we did chuckle and chortle at Ben Stiller’s foolhardy attempts to wow his prospective in-laws with tales of lactating feline nipples.
Fast forward a decade of decadent excess and installment number 3 of the Focker folktale has arrived, about as welcome as the latest banking bailout.
The first problem is that Little Fockers is not a film; there is no plot, there are no nice costumes or clever camera tricks, the score scores zero. This is a vehicle by which fading Hollywood legends euthanise their credibility, dare I say likeability, with limp jokes and tiresome puns about sex, parenthood, sexuality and how the name Focker sounds a lot like Fucker, in case you missed that in the first one. Or the second one. Or in every third minute of the third one.
That’s Robert de Niro there, on the screen, a Raging Bull castrated by jokes about how swallowing an erectile aid gives him raging balls. That’s Dustin Hoffman doing flamenco, dousing his integrity with Ishtar and feathers. Oh Babs, it’s raining on your parade, love.
Nothing works. They introduce Jessica Alba, an actress whose greatest critical success to date has been as a punching bag, as an excuse to slip in a sex scene, albeit in the guise of giving a fat middle-aged man an enema. Anal discomfort, hilarious! Hand sanitiser ejaculation, priceless! Owen Wilson’s formulaic goofiness hasn’t been funny since he tried to kill himself, and his character, the flawless new-age millionaire Kevin, needs to get over it already. It’s been 10 years. She married the Focker, it’s done.
The problem in Focker town is that Meet the Parents was a relatively enjoyable yarn of cringe laughs. Speedos and ash urns gave a slight film a slight edge, tinged with black. It is through its unending excesses that its all gone pear shaped.
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