You can’t hit a home run every time.
But when Robert De Niro, Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman, and Barbra
Streisand are carrying the lead roles in a sequel, the producers should have
hired the best script writer in the comedy business.
They didn’t. This script
is wan, to say the very least. Here
is a high powered team eager to add collective and considerable punch to
whatever they are asked to say. Unfortunately,
the dialogue is weak, the sight gags trite, and they are left standing there,
punching soap bubbles.
Scriptwriters Jim Herzfeld and John Hamburg seem stuck in a small pool of
adolescent humor, which may be an unfair thing to say about adolescents since a
theater full of them was very quiet on the night I saw it.
That’s clear: the movie is
a missed opportunity. Cast to the
hilt with nothing to say
So let’s talk about the laughs that do come, and about these brave
actors trying to make something of nothing.
The toddler in the family comes up with a name for his doting grandfather
that generates involuntary chuckles just because of the way it’s delivered.
Knowing they have a good thing in this great line spoken by a baby, the
filmmakers used it a few times too often; but it’s still brings the best laugh
in the house.
Everyone who has seen the trailer looks forward to the moment when the
tiny dog is flushed down the RV toilet only to surface in chemical blue. What we realize all too quickly is that a sight gag
diminishes with each passing second. The
trailer was better than the movie because the scene was shorter.
We all know by now that Robert De Niro and Blythe Danner play the
straight laced parents of the bride, Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand,
blooming as hippies, the parents of the groom.
It is groom Ben Stiller’s unenviable job to make peace between the two
couples which is a challenge equal to bringing peace to the Israelis and
Palestinians.
Robert deNiro uses one physical expression throughout: a grumpy sneer of disapproval even when nothing in the situations or dialogue calls for running cynicism. Blythe Danner, one of our finest stage actresses, plays Mom as dumb and ditzy. Ben Stiller gives an adequate but one note performance. It is left to the hippies, Hoffman and Streisand, to raise the laugh bar. Hoffman spreads the gospel of emotional expressionism, hugging everyone in sight, luring them to his certainty that all will be right if everyone just loves each other. The great surprise here is Barbra Streisand who never grabs for a scene and becomes surprisingly convincing as the exuberant mom who smothers her son in overprotective love. These actors could have made laugh waves if only they had been given something funny to say. My own sophomoric self still loves the bride’s announcement, “I’m taking my husband’s name; I will be Martha Focker.”
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