Meet The Parents (2000) * *

Directed by:  Jay Roach

Starring:  Robert DeNiro, Ben Stiller, Teri Polo, Owen Wilson, Blythe Danner

Greg Focker is a male nurse living with a loving woman named Pam.   He plans to propose to her, but first must meet her parents, who are Jack and Dina Byrnes.    Jack is a no-nonsense former CIA agent who immediately thinks Greg is full of crap and Dina is his wife who has patiently accepted her husband's faults.   Jack (DeNiro) speaks about a "circle of trust" and doesn't believe Greg should be a part of it.    This comes from a guy who posed as a flower shop owner as his CIA cover.    

Meet The Parents is a one-joke movie, told over and over again in varying ways, but the punch line is the same.     Greg tells a fib to ingratiate himself, but Jack calls him on it and Greg has to figure a way to squirm out of his lie.    Greg also screws up when handling Jack's mother's ashes or playing pool volleyball, in which a spike goes awry.    Most of Meet The Parents is uncomfortable, not funny, but maybe that's the point and I'm just missing it.    Regardless, it didn't work for me.    There are many top quality actors who do the best they can, but watching Greg repeatedly humiliate himself becomes tiresome.   There is little else that goes on. 

Predictably, Jack realizes he's being a prick and offers Greg an olive branch near the end.    This feels tacked on.   It forces a happy face on an otherwise grim comedy.    Some comedies thrive on presenting uncomfortable situations but how they're presented makes the difference.   I think back to A Fish Called Wanda, in which John Cleese's character has uncomfortable situations thrust upon him.   He's just a bumbling lawyer in love with a woman who is using him to find out the location of missing diamonds.    He tries his damnedest to lay low, but trouble finds him.    Greg Focker is a rather slow study.    He fails to understand that he is a terrible liar and he will be caught.    He puts himself into these situations so often that you would think he'd know better after the fifth or sixth try.

Meet The Parents spawned two sequels, both of which at least tried to expand the horizons of the original.     Meet The Fockers introduced Greg's parents, both of which were able to put Jack in his place at long last.   Little Fockers was an unnecessary third film which tried to squeeze every dime out of the franchise that it could.     Both sequels introduced plenty of plays on the last name Focker, but I think they should've quit while they were behind.