Review of Little Fockers (2010) by Shiira — 31 Dec 2010

"Little Fockers" is a disaster movie. Not in the genre sense of the word, in which some great calamity or other(an ocean liner is sinking; there's a highrise building on fire; bees! bees! everywhere, bees!) threatens the all-star cast's lives, but rather, it's an aesthetic disaster, a comedy with an aura of impending doom.

The collected actors, especially the old-timers, decorated many times over with awards and accolades, seem to be slumming like it was the nineteen-seventies. Unlike Fred Astaire and William Holden in "The Towering Inferno", or Richard Widmark and Olivia de Haviland in "The Swarm", nobody gets out alive in this second sequel to the inexplicably popular "Meet the Parents".

Unlike Ernest Borgnine in "The Poseidon Adventure"(released many years after Borgnine picked up his Best Actor Oscar for "Marty"), Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman, and Barbara Streisand go down with this sinking ship of a movie.

They're held accountable. Unlike those old war horses from Hollywood's classical period, most of them in semi-retirement when they participated in those Irwin Allen("The Master of Disaster") spectacles, DeNiro and his legendary co-stars are still active, and should be ashamed of themselves for involving themselves in such an obvious turkey.

Pure and simple, "Little Fockers" is a paycheck movie. Simply put, they phoned it in. On the other hand, Astaire and Widmark, legends from a bygone era, were no longer relevant to the then-current marketplace, and to that younger generation of yesteryear, they had the look of museum pieces in those analog event films, since both actors, and others of their ilk, were presented out of context with what made them vital and worth preserving in the first place.

Astaire, the star of "Top Hat"(second only to Stanley Donen's "Singing in the Rain" when it comes to ranking musicals), who would dance with Ginger Rogers as if his life depended on it, was then reduced to playing a stock character who just like everybody else, feared flames and smoke inhalation.

"The Towering Inferno" made him look like a has-been, a ghost of his former self. It's the same prevailing effect that the lowbrow hijinks of "Little Fockers" projects onto its distinguished cast, especially Streisand, who is clearly no longer a "Funny Girl", only fat.

Whereas Hoffman gets off relatively easy, in what amounts to little more than a special guest appearance(he calls his son "Gay", short for Gaylord, now known as Greg, played by Ben Stiller), DeNiro, overrated as a late-blooming comedian, is stuck with the unenviable task of carrying this film, and as Greg Focker's micro-managing father-in-law and foil, the Scorsese regular gets called on to do something that undoubtedly amounts to being the nadir of his long and illustrious career.

"The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle", notwithstanding. Erectile dysfunction and its pharmaceutical cure, minded for laughs in the recent "Love and Other Drugs", is the malady that keeps on giving apparently, when Stiller, whose participation in the extended boner joke may as well be his career low too, sticks a needle in DeNiro's side effect-plagued baby-making appendage, blessedly left to our imaginations, thanks to a strategically placed child who witnesses it all, and screams.

We know how he feels. The boy functions as a sort of in-frame, diegetical film critic. (In other words, he expresses his horror, and our horror of the scene's mounting.) Without his two-fold caterwaul, the medical-related ordeal would have been further exposed as an unfunny bit(the child's screaming may coax some into laughter), and be greeted by the same stony silence which follows the enema(!) that Jessica Alba(playing a flirtatious drug company rep) performs on a hospital patient, and Barbara Streisand's Dr.

Ruth shtick(she's the other Jewish sex therapist, Dr. Roz Focker). Ever desperate for laughs, this shameless film makes "Godfather" puns("Bobfather" is slightly less painful than "Godfocker"), and goes so far as trotting out Harvey Keitel for nostalgia's sake, and promptly gives him nothing to do.

Playing a crooked plumber, Keitel's filmic self sort of avenges Scout's death by Travis Bickle's gun in "Taxi Driver" when Jack Byrnes gets buried under a truckful of sand. In another film, the ditch that he digs would be used for hiding bodies.

In the absence of that film, he could start with his good buddy Bob.