Little Fockers Reviews

What a drastic change from the first two movies. This reminded me of a lazy Adam Sandler movie. It seems like the only actor that actually wanted to be in this movie was Jessica Alba. But it was nice to see Owen Wilson playing a larger role, it's too bad his character was written to become a sillier unrealistic caricature.

Luckily it did still illicit some laughs and it's difficult not to continue to enjoy the relationship between the main two characters, but oh how I wish they actually tried to make a decent end to this trilogy.

Robert De Niro is a great actor and he used to be my favorite one. However, he made a pretty good job lately ruining his prestigious legacy (at least, the situation is not as tragic as with Nicolas Cage…). Indeed, nowadays, he shows up in about 4 movies a year and most of them are really forgettable or even borderline bad. This movie is a perfect example. I mean, I thought that ‘Meet the Parents’ was actually pretty good and it was nice to see De Niro chewing this part providing his funniest character so far. Since it was a success, they had to make a sequel which was watchable but this last installment was just really unnecessary and rather cringe-inducing. Let’s start with this massive cast (Robert De Niro, Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, Blythe Danner, Teri Polo, Jessica Alba, Laura Dern, Harvey Keitel). Even though it does sound great on paper since this movie doesn’t even reach the 100 minutes, most of them just show up for a couple of scenes so you wonder if it was even worth casting them in the first place. Furthermore, the story was even rather pitiful this time around. And what was this with Greg Focker being a nurse but also being a manager at the same time?!? I mean, if you decide that your main character should have an unexpected job, just stick to it and don’t make it look like something different (the fact that he could built a huge house with a nurse salary was also rather ridiculous). Above all, the jokes were pretty bad but, I have to admit it, I had to laugh a couple of times because of how stupid it looked like so they get a few points here but I’m being generous. To conclude, it is yet another disappointing feature starring De Niro and it is not really worth a look, even if you liked the previous installments.

Ever since the release of Meet The Fockers, there have been a lot of rumours about a third instalment in the series and, to be perfectly honest, I didn't really think it was a great idea especially when they only just survived critically with Meet The Fockers even though I prefer that one over Meet The Parents and quite frankly, it was literally everything that I was expecting it to be. I knew that because the predecessor and this one have a 6 year gap, I did think it would lose tone and then would have the same jokes with nothing different added to it. I think there was one thing that was absolute genius about this film and that was the title of the film. It is an absolutely fantastic title because yeah the kids names are Focker but kids really can be little fuckers at times! So the title is both extraordinary and hilarious. We had not seen them in the previous two and this one led to the family's lives with the kids here now.


It has taken 10 years, two little Fockers with wife Pam and countless hurdles for Greg/Gaylord to finally get "in" with his tightly wound father-in-law, Jack. After the cash-strapped dad takes a job moonlighting for a drug company, Jack's suspicions about his favourite male nurse come roaring back when he begins to get suspicious about Greg cheating on Pam with new work colleague Andi. When Greg and Pam's entire clan-including Pam's lovelorn ex, Kevin descends for the twins' birthday party, Greg must prove to the sceptical Jack that he's fully capable as the man of the house. But with all the misunderstandings, spying and covert missions, will Greg pass Jack's final test and become the family's next patriarch...or will the circle of trust be broken for good?


Robert De Niro is the perfect actor for the Jack Byrnes character but I am afraid to say that despite it is Robert De Niro, I thought he slightly lost his charm with the character and neither bought anything new and extraordinary to the character and didn't bring out anything that we hadn't seen before so I think he was on the edge of both of them. He wasn't bad, though, despite that. I love Ben Stiller in these films! He was brilliant once again as Greg/Gaylord Focker. I mean, both De Niro and Stiller certainly do make a great duo but because I wasn't entirely impressed with De Niro in this one, couldn't fully get to grips with the fantastic duo that we saw in the two predecessors. I just cannot stand Owen Wilson. He is an idiot who just cannot act (except Marley & Me perhaps) but because he was in this one more than Meet The Parents and Meet The Fockers, that was another reason why I sort of felt slightly put off by this third instalment. Not only did Jessica Alba make the audience feel worse for the relationship between Greg/Gaylord and Pam, she made our eyes burn with her admittedly gorgeous body but also her lousy acting! All I think of Andi's character is just a greedy, careless, dirty slut, nothing more. Daisy Tahan and Colin Baiocchi were actually very good as twins Samantha and Henry Focker.


Ok, so Jay Roach wasn't the director of Little Fockers this time like he was of Meet The Parents and Meet The Fockers although he did produce it again, like the first two films. Paul Weitz, who is perhaps the poorer director out of him and his brother Chris Weitz was chosen to direct this one and I have to say that most scenes were weakly handled and rather irresponsible on occasions. Paul previously did films such as Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, American Pie and About A Boy so I guess he has had experience with comedies but not really with a hugely successful one, though. Out of those films that he has done in the past, I would say that Little Fockers is his weakest project thus far. The script was rather soppy throughout most of the film but there were some interesting moments in the film too.


Overall, Little Fockers is a decent film that I did enjoy despite its extremely deep flaws and it's overdone dialogue. This needs to be the last of the series because I think it ended decent enough even though I still think that Little Fockers was rather irrelevant anyway and Meet The Fockers was a great film with a great, solid ending. There are great performances from most of the cast (except Wilson and Alba as predicted) but direction and script was rather lame. It is just a guilty pleasure that I would just watch for entertainment, nothing more.

"I'm so excited to see those little Fockers!"

Back in 2000, Meet the Parents earned big bucks at the box office by pitting Ben Stiller's patented tightly-wound schlub persona against Robert De Niro's potentially homicidal tough-guy persona. See, the former persona wanted to propose to the daughter of the latter persona, and hence hilarity ensued. While Meet the Parents was highly enjoyable, the 2004 sequel Meet the Fockers arguably improved upon the formula, as De Niro's outlandish suspicions and sabotage at long last met their match in the face of Stiller's freewheeling hippie parents. The next logical step in the series was to introduce children into the equation, and 2010's Little Fockers complies with this logic (why not Meet the Little Fockers, though?). Despite the change in director (Paul Weitz replaced Jay Roach) and the mostly negative reviews, Little Fockers is far more entertaining and amusing than a second sequel has any right to be. When it comes to harmless family entertainment, you could do far worse than this.

Many years have passed in the Focker household. Little Fockers finds male nurse Gaylord "Greg" Focker (Stiller) and his wife Pam (Polo) raising twins Samantha (Tahan) and Henry (Baiocchi) in a suburb of Chicago. Facing mounting bills and about to move into a new house, Greg agrees to shill an erectile-dysfunction drug for attractive pharmaceutical rep Andi Garcia (Alba). At the start of the film, the twins' birthday is fast approaching, meaning that grandparents and friends will soon be arriving in Chicago. The birthday is complicated by two factors, however. Principally, that Pam's father Jack (De Niro) has a minor heart attack and deems it necessary to select a patriarch to lead the family's next generation, and decides to hand the role to Greg. In order for Greg to attain this title, however, Jack has to consider him worthy, which leads to meddling, spying and background checks. On top of this, Pam's insufferable ex-boyfriend Kevin (Wilson) has dropped in for a visit.

Interestingly, despite the title implying that the focus has been shifted to the younger Focker generation, Little Fockers is still predominantly concerned with the adult cast. Nonetheless, while the kids do not receive a great deal of screen-time, they still have a fairly substantial bearing on the story (the birthday party does set the plot in motion). However, there's not much of a story here anyway; Little Fockers is a lot of vignettes connected by a lazy script. The random plot threads lurking within - such as the attempt to get the twins into a distinguished school, the troubles with the builders working on Greg and Pam's new house, and the attempts to market the erectile-dysfunction medication - do not lead to payoffs, as they merely hit brick walls and are never brought up again (a lot of re-writing and re-editing occurred during post-production, so perhaps the resolutions of these plotlines were left on the cutting room floor). At least Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers had their respective plot strands resolved. Speaking of the previous movies, little mention is made of characters such as Denny and Little Jack, which is disappointing.

Yet, while plot and story are not a strong suit in the case of Little Fockers and while Jack being mistrustful of Greg is highly reminiscent of the previous movies, this second sequel nonetheless delivers its fair share of belly laughs (including a very amusing Jaws homage). After a slow start, the movie eventually settles into an amiable groove and holds steady; remaining highly entertaining until the very end. Paul Weitz afforded the film a gloriously brisk pace, though anyone expecting start-to-finish laughter will most likely walk away disappointed. In particular, there are not enough scenes taking advantage of the family dynamic. Despite John Hamburg having a hand in the scripting (he co-wrote Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers), there are a few sections which are devoid of genuine laughs. However, Little Fockers at least never grows excruciating in between the belly laughs - there's a great deal of energy. This is more than what can be said for a lot of other comedy duds which were unleashed upon the world in 2010, such as Grown-Ups and Vampires Suck.

Unsurprisingly, Stiller and De Niro kept doing their usual shtick here. Stiller neither stands out nor underwhelms, while De Niro gets a fair amount of laughs. For all of De Niro's attempts at self-parody, his character of Jack Byrnes remains vividly-rendered. And De Niro has a scene in which he fights with a role played by Harvey Keitel. It's doubtful this is the old-age reunion that De Niro and Keitel imagined while working together on Taxi Driver back in the '70s. Also in the cast is Owen Wilson, who has more screen-time than ever as Kevin. Wilson leaned on his usual shtick here, and the result is a serviceable but unremarkable performance. Despite her role amounting to a glorified cameo, Blythe Danner is her usual endearing self as Dina Byrnes, while Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand are often amusing but underused. Hoffman is especially absent - he did not take part in principal photography; instead, he came back for reshoots, and consequently plays no real part in the story (not that there's much of a story, mind you). Delivering more effectively in the laughs department are Jessica Alba and Laura Dern.

There's not a great deal else which can be said about Little Fockers. It is what it is - comfort food for the masses; an unthreatening, unremarkable comedy. If you find this movie hilarious, you'll love it. If this type of humour does not appeal to you, you'll hate it. Admittedly, Little Fockers is sillier than its predecessors and not as funny as its predecessors (and, frankly, not funny enough), but it's difficult to imagine fans of the franchise walking away bitterly disappointed. With an A-list cast like this pulling off exuberant personalities, this is a predictable but not entirely unwelcome addition to the Focker family.

6.1/10

Should squeeze out a few good laughs, right?