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"It's like comedy only without the humour"

Recently I found myself in a cultural wasteland of a place with time to kill. I was stuck for an evening at a friends house who didn't read, had little interest in music and no cable TV. As I had an evening to kill whilst they were out, with no books to peruse and no music to play, I resigned myself to the fact that i would have to find something from the limited TV choice to fill the time. The best of a bad selection was Meet the Parents, so I thought that I would share my pains, sorry, thoughts with you. The first thing to say is sort of a disclaimer in defence of the film and to balance slightly the review that will follow, as Im sure you have worked out by now that it wasn't my cup of tea at all, did the title above give you that impression perhaps. Humour doesn't often travel across the Atlantic very successfully. Sure some stateside productions such as Friends, Frasier and Scrubs have gone down a storm in "dear old blighty" and similarly Monty Python and Benny Hill for example have been well received in the "colonies" but by and large the humours of Britain and the United States remain fairly exclusive to each other. I accept that that is a big generalisation and also that this review will be fairly biased (as I am English) but I will try to be as fair as I can.

The basic premise is this, Gaylord "Greg" Focker (a name which in itself says something about the sophistication of the film) is settling into a comfortable relationship with Pam Byrnes, so comfortable in fact that he wants to pop the question. Before he does so he is awakened to the fact that to win her families approval he should take the old fashioned route and ask the father of his intended for his permission. This results in a weekend at the family residence where Greg causes mayhem and embarrassment all round as he tries and fails to impress the family. That really is the plot and although less is often more, as they say, in this instance the saying does not hold true. The series of events that comprise the body of the film are fairly predictable and full of clich and have been used in films for the last hundred years, ever since Chaplin first fell in love with a flower seller or Harold Lloyd fell off of a roof. The punch lines are that predictable that you not only see them coming but you can see them getting on a bus 14 miles up the road. Greg played by Ben Stiller, is the archetypal "beneath the standards that the family expect" character and plays

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