Little Fockers

Has former CIA agent Jack Byrnes finally come to like and appreciate his son-in-law Gaylord Focker? We will find out in the next instalment of this comedy series.

Much like most of the world I was pleasantly surprised by the film 'Meet The Parents'. While the premise was familiar, it had enough charm and honest humour that made it so much better than you expected. A few years later they followed with the equally good 'Meet The Fockers' (I tend to think part of the popularity of this series is the title which gives some people the excuse to accidentally swear). Now after a bit of a gap we get another installment. Sadly this is one of those situations where you can really only get two films worth of mileage out of a concept. Once you have met the parents from both sides of the family there is not much else to explore. Which is why this film does not live up to expectations. By now we know Jack hates Gaylord and that it is not really going to change. Gaylord needs to understand that he will never win Jack's approval no matter what he does. This maybe alright for the film if it was funny but the makers of this film cannot seem to come up with too many good situations or funny lines to make the film good enough. There are also subplots, like anew house that Gaylord is having renovated that could have provided more comedic potential but wasn't. A few of the 'boner medication' jokes are good but most of it we have seen before.

The regular cast of the series pretty much play their roles as expected. None of them do anything terribly special to make them stand out. Owen Wilson gets a lot more screen time and just extends his role as a rival to Gaylord. Another concept which is wearing thin. Laura Dern gets a few good laughs from her minor role. What I hated the most about this film was Jessica Alba. Her character really irritated me and came across as far too annoying. I think for her role to be effective she needed to be less over the top in her pursuit of Gaylord. If they could have developed more innocent situations for them to be involved in that accidentally caused problems. Rather than such obvious ones where you can see the jokes coming.

While I like the closure of a trilogy, this is not a film series that needed a third outing. Perhaps if they tried a bit harder in coming up with a better concept it may have worked better.