Meet The Parents (2000)

The Long Review:

There are a lot of movies made about planning a wedding, holding a wedding, breaking up a wedding, or jilting a wedding. But there aren't a whole lot made about the pre-wedding plans: the proposal. Meet The Parents does an excellent job of exploring the feelings, f un, and fiasco behind asking your significant other to marry you…after meeting the approval of the parentals. Ben Stiller stars as Greg Focker, a male nurse, who spends a weekend getting to know his girlfriend's family and pretty much dodging her ex-CIA agent father's hate bullets (figuratively speaking, of course). What follows is a wild, wacko couple of days where everything that could go wrong, goes wrong…terribly wrong.

The plot is decent, not resorting to clichéd, predictable slapstick comedy to solicit laughs from the audience. There's some gross humour, yes, but it wasn't delivered in a disgusting manner, the way movies such as Dumb and Dumber and The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps delivered theirs. The comedy in Meet The Parents is degrees more sophisticated; so the laughs are ten times louder and more deserved. The never-ending chain of mishaps, athough improbable, is not impossible. Hey, sh*t happens, right? And the point of this film is to laugh at a guy who has the worst luck when he needs good luck the most.

Ben Stiller is excellent as a guy in love desperately seeking to fit into his girlfriend's clan. Dunno…Ben Stiller just has this cuckoo, clueless quality about him that makes him perfect for roles such as this one. In the movie, you find yourself laughing at him and feeling sorry for him at the same time. The poor guy! Robert De Niro is hilarious as a militant dad out to get the better of his first-born's boyfriend. It's rare that you see Robert De Niro do comedy; and what he does here is pretty good stuff. And Teri Polo as Stiller's charming daughter does a great job, too, of playing innocent but appeasing bystander while all hell breaks loose at her parents' house.

Roger Ebert claims that Meet The Parents is funnier than the Austin Power movies, also directed by Jay Roach, because "it never tries too hard." We agree. You laugh because things are sincerely funny, not because you feel you should. Overall, it's a great movie loaded with laughs that's worthy of being seen at full ticket prices. You'll get what you pay for!