My review of “Meet the Fockers” on Amazon.com

“Meet the Fockers” had a big promise of great fun for me – I’ve liked the first movie, Meet the Parents, quite a lot. Meet the Fockers is about Pam’s parents finally meeting the future in-laws – an event Greg clearly is very nervous about. Things start rather smoothly, even as Pam and Greg get to the Byrneses house, where Jack is happily engaged in the grand-parenting business – a bit obsessively as is a custom with him, with Little Jack (or L.J. for short) as the object of his child-raising experiments, but then they very quickly get on a bumpy road. The main problem is the Fockers are nothing like the Byrneses – they like to live their life at full and in the full view of whoever wants to watch. They never hold their feelings, they are spontaneous to a fault and obviously that throws the old uptight Jack for a curve. A lot of misunderstandings, confusion and embarrassment later finally end up in a grand finale – The Wedding! With Kevin the old boy-friend as a rabbi no less. Unfortunately for me, this time a lot of “funny” moments in the movie revolved around toilet and sex life jokes and it looks to me I was more siding with the Byrneses in my reaction to them than with the Fockers. In short, I did not get it. Most of the funny moments for me were related to LJ – here is a cute funny little guy with the great sense of humor! I did enjoy seeing Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman in the roles of Greg’s parents – I may not like the story much, but those two act as naturally as they breathe and it’s great to watch! Oh, and the two animals in the movie – the cat Jinx and the Chihuahua Moses – those were a lot of fun too. All in all I suppose the movie was OK to watch once, but when I watched it the second time – to see what the DVD extended version looks like – I even found it a bit boring. The extended version has the deleted scenes included and it’s painfully obvious why they were deleted – they don’t add anything to the narrative, only make it longer, not more fun. The other extras I suppose might be interesting for those who did like the movie. There is the Fockers Family Portrait, the story of creation of one of the main props in the movie ( I won’t tell you what it is), Behind- the-scenes with Jinx the Cat and the story of how the role of Little Jack was played – and I rather liked the last two extras, they were fun to watch.

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