Meet the Parents is enjoyable just about any time you happen upon it. It works Saturday afternoons on TBS, or as a Thanksgiving rental when the family is over and Mom might be offended by the antics of Will Ferrell in Anchorman. Granted, Stiller is playing the same loser, put upon character he always plays, but well, that’s because he’s really good at that character. In Meet the Parents that character works better than ever.

So Meet the Fockers is the sequel that well… just probably didn’t need to happen. The risk is that it’ll end up being another Analyze That. Can a repeat of more of the same still be funny? Maybe, I mean they have Dustin Hoffman… he’s funny… isn’t he? Dustin Hoffman and Barbara Streisand join the returning cast of Robert DeNiro, Blythe Danner, and Teri Polo. Dustin and Babs jump in as Stiller’s parents, the Fockers. Somehow, Stiller’s parents and Teri Polo’s, the Byrnes end up stuck together in the same house. I guess the Fockers have them over for dinner. Whatever. It’s supposed to be funny because you see Jack Byrnes is really anal retentive and the Fockers are all a bunch of super-liberal hippies. You see now why the Babs casting is appropriate.

The real problem is that we’ve seen this before. It was on TV in a quickly forgotten little show called “Dharma & Greg”. For about five minutes it was really popular, and stayed so just long enough to make Jenna Elfman famous. Can Meet the Fockers deliver anything better than the mildly funny melba toast humor of “Dharma”? Our only hope is the Jesus-lovin, wood carving character of Owen Wilson.

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