Meet the Fokkers

D

This isn't a movie I was going to go out of my way to see. The first installment certainly wasn't great art. But I got a free weekend of HBO and Showtime so I went ahead and watched. What a dreadful movie. It isn't that it is completely unwatchable. Sometimes I would sit there and think what a long time it had been since anything remotely funny had happened and would start fast forwarding only to stop soon after and see what was happening. It was like watching a car wreck, I guess.

Ben Stiller plays the same kind of role as before. He's a nice guy but does incredibly stupid things. For the most part he is embarrassed by his parents rather than just doing the opposite of everything Robert De Niro tells him to do. Stiller's parents are played by Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman. It is amazing they could draw these two. Streisand is good and has always had a good sense of comedy. Dustin Hoffman plays her sex-crazed husband. He is pathetic. He is a good actor and can even be a good straight man, but here you just feel sorry for him as he struggles to be funny and charming and fails at both.

De Niro is good, but he is just doing the same thing that you saw in the last movie taken to a less believable extreme. They think of more weird things for him to do, but the writing lets him down miserably.

Anyway, while there might have been a few somewhat amusing parts and it isn't so bad I had to stop watching, there is nothing redeeming about this movie. I'll give it a D.

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