Meet the Parents is a perfect example. For some reason, I'd gotten the impression that this was a smart, off-beat, vaguely indie film, sort of like Flirting with Disaster. Turns out it's actually a dumb, formulaic comedy more suited to Adam Sandler than Ben Stiller. Not that there's anything wrong with dumb comedy when it's well done, but it needs to be inventive or heedlessly over the top. Meet the Parents is neither.
Ben Stiller sure tries his hardest, though. He's clearly too good for this material. You see every joke coming from a country mile away, yet somehow Stiller manages to sell many of them anyway. He plays Greg Focker (and don't think the movie doesn't flay that dead horse of a joke for all it's worth), a male nurse (and don't think the movie doesn't flay that dead horse as well) who wants to ask his girlfriend, blandly blond Teri Polo, an actress unburdened by any discernible personality, to marry him. But he decides he should ask her father for permission first -- a reactionary bit of chauvinism that goes unremarked upon, though actually it's the girlfriend who wants him to ask her father; Stiller, who plays the only sane and likable character in the movie, is originally prepared to propose to her (albeit in a cloyingly cutesy way) without ever having met her parents. Of course -- get ready for wacky hijinks! -- her father is ultra-suspicious ex-CIA agent Robert De Niro (bet Dubya could get some good advice from him on "subliminable" messages).
Robert De Niro's career, like history, appears the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. It seems like all his roles now spoof his roles of ten or twenty years ago. There's no reason to have an actor of this caliber in this movie. He's not even particularly scary; the truly frightening parent is Blythe Danner as the creepily cheerful mom with weirdly folksy tics, sort of like she's an alien who learned to act like a human mother by watching "Leave It to Beaver."
Meet the Parents has its charms, slight though they are. It's reasonably funny and amusing for a little while. But it's lightweight and sloppily constructed, and it soon collapses into a heap of pointless slapstick. Every time Stiller turns around, he's setting something on fire or destroying some cherished object, and it grows tiresome. It's nothing you can't see on any mediocre sitcom any night of the week, and at least with a sitcom, you can watch it for free in your own home without smelly, annoying people around. Unless you're dating or married to a smelly, annoying person, which is neither my business nor my problem.
Believe it or not, this is actually a remake of an Emo Philips movie. There are so many things in that sentence that bother me, I don't even know where to begin.
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