Based on a 75-minute short from 1992, Meet the Parents is an entertaining look at the harrowing experience of meeting your girlfriend’s father for the first time.  Or, if you’re a girl, the equally harrowing experience of having your boyfriend meet your father for the first time.  It’s certainly enjoyable, but the film would have been a lot more so if the majority of the funny bits weren’t given away in the trailer.

Ben Stiller (Keeping the Faith) plays Greg Focker, an E.R. nurse from Chicago who is head-over-heels in love with a schoolteacher named Pam Byrnes (Teri Polo, Felicity).  Parents begins with Greg rehearsing the marriage proposal to his beloved, but when the time comes, the special moment is interrupted by a phone call from Pam’s sister, Debbie.  She announces that she’s engaged and will be married in two weeks, but the best part of all is that her future husband had the good sense to ask for her father’s permission first.

A quick thinker, Greg palms the engagement ring he was about to give to Pam, and the two take off for Oyster Bay, Long Island, the location of Debbie’s wedding and the home of Jack and Dina Byrnes (Robert De Niro, The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle and Blythe Danner, Forces of Nature).  Greg plans on winning over Pam’s dad and getting the green light to pop the question to his eldest daughter.

But things immediately begin to spin out of control for poor Greg.  First the airline loses his luggage.  Then Pam tells him that he’s not allowed to smoke in front of her dad (it’s a sign of weakness).  The big surprise comes when Greg meets Jack for the first time.  Despite the fact that he’s a cat-loving, poetry-writing, Peter-Paul-and-Mary-singing old man that uses baby talk to communicate with Pam (he calls her “Pam-cakes”), Jack instantly becomes suspicious of his potential son-in-law.  He makes fun of Greg’s name and his occupation within minutes of his arrival.

To make matters worse, Pam’s ex-fiancé (Owen Wilson, Shanghai Noon) is the best man at Debbie’s wedding.  But things take an even more disturbing turn for Greg when he finds out that Jack isn’t really a retired florist but an ex-CIA agent with the uncanny ability to tell if people are lying (this is also revealed in the trailer).  Greg is like a car stuck in the mud – the harder he spins his tires to get free from Jack’s bad side, the deeper he makes his hole.

Greg commits one hysterical social faux pas after another, ultimately ruining Debbie’s wedding.  There are a lot of well-timed set-pieces, but the real charm of the film comes from the relationship between Greg and Jack; the former looking like a deer caught in the headlights, the latter giving disapproving looks with a perpetually cocked head.

It’s hard to imagine anybody but Stiller playing Greg, and only Christopher Walken could have played DeNiro’s role better, and that would have been a little too frightening.  There is also a very funny running gag involving Greg’s last name (pronounced like it’s spelled).  You have to wonder what the MPAA thought about lines like “Jesus, Focker,” and “Didn’t you, Focker?” when a PG-13 movie is only allowed to use the F-word once.

Parents was directed by Jay Roach (Austin Powers) and written by James Herzfeld (Meet the Deedles) and John Hamburg (Safe Men), who based their script on the short created by Greg Glienna (who played Greg in the original) and Mary Ruth Clarke.  The film starts to drag as it approaches the finale, and the ending is completely predictable.  Despite this, and the fact that the trailer gave too much away, the film is still very fun and very entertaining.

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