— but that only makes the quality of talent involved more than routinely depressing. 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? 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). Hoffman, who spends his first scene learning to flamenco in Seville, looks fit, tan, rested, and ready. 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). 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. Just try to keep the Sierra Mist from coming up your nose!) 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.
– 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.”