Is there a statute of limitations for how many good actors can be wasted in a bad movie? Antic and only fitfully amusing, “Little Fockers’’ is the multiplex equivalent of a cash grab — it’s a three-quel, what did you expect? — but that only makes the quality of talent involved more than routinely depressing. 
 
 Yes, there’s Robert De Niro once more playing ex-CIA agent Jack Byrnes, paranoid ramrod father-in-law to male nurse Greg Focker (Ben Stiller). The ever-underutilized Blythe Danner is his wife again, and, as Greg’s parents, Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman dash through at the beginning and end, spritzing happily because they’re not on the hook for the entire film. Hoffman, who spends his first scene learning to flamenco in Seville, looks fit, tan, rested, and ready. Unfortunately, he’s ready for a different movie. 
 
 Teri Polo returns as Greg’s wife, Pam, and Owen Wilson as her ex-boyfriend Kevin, the latter mellow and perfect and weirdly neurotic. New players include Jessica Alba, as a pharmaceutical rep with the hots for Greg, and Laura Dern, as the mealy-mouthed principal of a private kindergarten. Sadly, director Paul Weitz (“American Pie,’’ “About a Boy’’) and writers John Hamburg and Larry Stuckey have no idea what to do with either actress. Alba overacts frenetically — it’s like she has to pee really badly in every one of her scenes — and Dern’s plotline just disappears midway through. Too bad; her character’s administrative K-12 doubletalk (“No two early humans are alike’’) is the funniest part of the movie. 
 
 Otherwise, the humor goes below the belt early and often. “Little Fockers’’ features an extended enema gag and a box of musical condoms — and that’s just the first five minutes. Much is made of an erectile dysfunction medicine called “Sustengo,’’ and the movie’s comic high/low point comes when Greg has to inject his father-in-law in the privates with an Epi-Pen. Try explaining that to the kids. 
 
 That’s one of the few scenes that goes so far into bad taste as to be genuinely uproarious; otherwise, the jokes get halfway there and wimp out with a crude little splat. The original “Meet the Parents’’ was a comedy of emasculation that didn’t match its obvious model, “There’s Something About Mary,’’ but that came close enough for the studio bean-counters. True to its title, “Little Fockers’’ feels like the movie’s hyperactive grandkid, picking up and putting down various plotlines until you want to send it off for a long nap. 
 
 For moviegoers who were around in the 1970s, here’s the saddest part: Harvey Keitel shows up in the small role of Greg’s house contractor and gets a one-scene face-off with De Niro’s Jack. The two men circle each other for a few seconds, like pitbulls descended from Brando, and then it’s over before it begins. “Little Fockers’’ is the sixth movie the actors have appeared in together and it’s easily the laziest and least; what started with “Mean Streets’’ and “Taxi Driver’’ has come down to . . . this. They should have just brought in Pacino and called it “Mother Fockers.’’ Note to the producers: I’m kidding. 
 
 Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. To follow him, go to www.twitter.com/tyburr. 
 
 © Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company. ||||| Little Fockers COMEDY: United States, 2010 U.S. Release Date: 2010-12-22 Running Length: 1:35 MPAA Classification: PG-13 (Profanity, Sexual Content) Theatrical Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 Cast: Robert De Niro, Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, Blythe Danner, Teri Polo, Jessica Alba, Laura Dern Director: Paul Weitz Screenplay: John Hamburg and Larry Stuckey Cinematography: Remi Adefarasin Music: Stephen Trask U.S. Distributor: Universal Pictures Subtitles: none 
 
 Watching Little Fockers is a depressing experience. Rarely does a comedy bring such an overpowering sense of sadness. Admittedly, I laughed a few times and am willing to admit that the experience as a whole was more bearable than the trial of sitting through Meet the Fockers, but that doesn't alleviate my fundamental reaction: this is perhaps the most dispiriting motion picture of the holiday season. It's all about Robert De Niro. Once, in what seems to have been another lifetime, De Niro was considered by many to be the greatest living actor. That was before he started dabbling in comedy. It didn't take long for the novelty value to wear off. Now, like Leslie Nielsen, he has become impossible to take seriously. With this year's Stone, it appeared there might yet be hope for De Niro to return to acting. Little Fockers has shattered that hope. In many ways, it represents a new low for De Niro, a level of embarrassment to which I never thought I would see him sink. Watching his third outing as lunatic father Jack Byrnes, I embraced the reality that the De Niro of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas is dead. All we have left is this bloated self-parody. Talk about a harsh dose of reality. (De Niro, it should be noted, is complicit in the immolation of his image - he's listed as a producer, as he was for Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers.) 
 
 Little Fockers continues the saga of Greg Focker (Ben Stiller); his wife, Pam (Teri Polo, reduced to a glorified cameo); and his father-in-law from hell, Jack (De Niro). Also returning for this installment are Pam's old flame, Kevin (Owen Wilson, less funny here than in James L. Brooks' How Do You Know); Jack's wife, Dina (Blythe Danner); and Greg's parents, Bernie (Dustin Hoffman, appearing in only a few scenes) and Roz (Barbra Streisand, with less screen time than Hoffman). New to the Focker universe is drug company representative Andi Garcia (Jessica Alba), who is hawking an erectile dysfunction drug called "Sustengo." The (thin) storyline focuses on Jack's decision that Greg will become the "Godfocker" - the patriarch of the next generation of Byrnes and Fockers. In order for Greg to hold that title, however, Jack has to deem him worthy, and that requires spying and background checks. Some of the things Jack uncovers, like Greg's apparent dalliance with Andi, stoke his anger, and the simmering hostility between Jack and Greg explodes into all-out war. 
 
 Director Paul Weitz, replacing Jay Roach, culls the most humor he can from the situations, but anyone expecting start-to-finish laughter will be disappointed. No matter what your taste in humor, whether it's low-brow bodily fluid material or somewhat more sophisticated jokes, there's something here to touch the funny bone - but don't expect too much of it. The person who chortles at De Niro's 5 1/2-hour erection probably isn't going to be as amused by the Jaws parody. The hit-and-miss comedy comes in service of an inane plot with zero character development. The real problem with Little Fockers is that most of the humor found in these circumstances was explored in the first movie, Meet the Parents, including the closeness of the name "Focker" to a profane word. Meet the Fockers re-hashed these things, and Little Fockers is going for the hat trick. The only new element is Jessica Alba but, aside from providing some eye candy (she has an underwear scene), she doesn't add more beyond a vacuous smile and a chirpy demeanor. 
 
 There's not a lot to say about Little Fockers. It is what it is. It's comfort food for the masses - an unthreatening comedy with familiar faces doing pretty much the same things they have done in two previous excursions. Despite numerous sexual references and double entendres, it's not too graphic to be deemed unsuitable for older children and is at least occasionally amusing. There's no reason for this movie to exist except that its predecessors made a lot of money. By churning out this third installment, Universal is guaranteed at least a modest return on their investment (and perhaps better than that) and everyone involved stands to collect a nice check. It's a winning proposition for all except those increasingly rare movie-goers who crave a daring or original comedy that doesn't feel like a recycled sit-com. 
 
 Discuss this topic in the ReelViews Forums. ||||| As I suffered through "Little Fockers," wishing that I could have periodontal surgery instead and wondering exactly how I wound up a member of the bizarre cadre of human beings who watch movies like this because it's our job, I managed to identify a silver lining of sorts. I'm fairly sure that Robert De Niro views his role in this lamentable comic series, playing a Midwestern Irish-American ex-CIA agent named Jack Byrnes, as something of an acting exercise. Can this consummate New Yorker shed his accent, his inflections and expressions and body language and everything else that's encoded into his Italian-American DNA? He kind of can, and it's intermittently fun to watch De Niro, whose every impulse is to go outward and upward, as a guy who drives all emotion downward and inward. 
 
 Yeah. OK. And maybe it's also a study in actorly technique when Jack has his son-in-law and long-running adversary, male nurse Gaylord "Greg" Focker (Ben Stiller), give him an injection in his fully erect whangdoodle? Or when Jack and Greg's dad, Bernie Focker (Dustin Hoffman), exchange fart and booger jokes around the extended-family Christmas-Chanukah table? Those things are of course the entire point of the Focker franchise, which weds its aging, high-prestige cast to a set of creaky, homophobic gross-out gags that would make many eighth-graders roll their eyes in embarrassment. Can we talk about something extraneous again now? Since female stars like Nicole Kidman get so much grief for what looks like botched cosmetic surgery, what's the deal with Ben Stiller's eyes? Greg and/or Gay (Gay Focker! Gay Focker! Just try to keep the Sierra Mist from coming up your nose!) looks mysteriously, er, youthful these days -- in a cadaverous, guyliner-y kind of way. 
 
 Six years after Hoffman and Barbra Streisand joined the party in "Meet the Fockers" and a full decade after the original "Meet the Parents" (a mostly harmless exercise in paranoid family comedy, taken by itself) it seemed reasonable to believe there was no more Fockery goodness at the bottom of that well. Original director Jay Roach has had the good taste -- well, let's say the common decency -- to move on, but Universal Pictures has reassembled the entire gang under director Paul Weitz, which can only mean there's more mixed-audience holiday coin to be made here. So we get Streisand as Greg's mom, TV sex-chat host Roz Focker, making out with Owen Wilson, as the puppyish rich boy who hangs around waiting for a second chance with Greg's wife, Pam (Teri Polo). And Hoffman sweatily dancing flamenco. And Greg and Jack being mistaken for lovers by a New Agey school principal (Laura Dern) and then punching it out in a birthday-party ball pit after a misunderstanding that involves a hot Latina chick in sexy lingerie and Greg's miserable efforts to become the family's "Godfocker." They kill me, these guys. No, seriously. If they make any more of these movies, they might as well kill me. Once more with feeling: Gay Focker!
– Little Fockers, the third and, critics promise, worst movie of the Meet the Parents franchise, opens with an extended enema joke, and pretty much goes downhill from there. Here’s a healthy dose of the critical scorn being heaped on it: “I suffered through Little Fockers wishing that I could have periodontal surgery instead,” writes Andrew O'Hehir of Salon. It’s a collection of “creaky, homophobic gross-out gags that would make many eighth-graders roll their eyes in embarrassment.” The only picture of the year more vulgar, pathetic and unfunny was the one Brett Favre allegedly sent over his cellphone, quips Kyle Smith of the New York Post. It’s a movie “of such boundless ineptitude that I’d rather watch student films, or even Glee.” Yet ironically, it’s not tasteless enough. “The jokes get halfway there and wimp out with a crude little splat,” complains Ty Burr of the Boston Globe. It also suffers from egregious overacting from Jessica Alba. “It’s like she has to pee really badly in every one of her scenes.” “Rarely does a comedy bring such an overpowering sense of sadness,” writes James Berardinelli of ReelViews. Once, Robert De Niro was a truly great actor. But this movie “represents a new low … a level of embarrassment to which I never thought I would see him sink.”