Little Fockers

To start the new cinema year on a particularly low note - not a film I was particularly enthusiastic about seeing, but I was outvoted. I really enjoyed Meet the Parents, but Meet the Fockers was dreadfully unfunny. No matter how bad this is, I thought, surely it will have more laughs than that. How wrong can I be! This is lazy, cynical, unfunny film-making at its worst. So here are my notes to Hollywood on how to avoid this kind of travesty in the future:

• Jokes that were funny first time round, but not the second, don't suddenly become funny because you try them a third time. Even the stars seem to have stop believing in the material and not even the thought of a big fat paycheck can muster any enthusiasm from messers Stiller and De Niro, let alone anything resembling actual acting as they lazily coast through the same routines again without any effort.
• More stars do not necessarily make a better picture. Jessica Alba and Harvey Keitel are added to the mix this time round. Keitel is presumably thrown in as somebody thought it would be "funny" to have him square off with De Niro - its not, just a reminder of much better films where they had some decent material to work with and could be bothered. Meanwhile Dustin Hoffman lazily dances his way to the bank having done not very much at all.
• There is a difference between funny and irritating. It is possible to make irritating funny - Owen Wilson can do it (with decent material to work with), but here he's just plain irritating. Whilst Jessica Alba trying to talk all dope and down with it has got to be one of the most annoying characters ever committed to celluloid.
• A man injecting adrenalin into his father-in-law's penis to remedy an excess of viagra is just not funny. I don't think I need to stay more.
• Genuine humour doesn't need signposting in advance to let you know you should laugh soon whereas this telegraphs every joke with huge neon signs well before they actually arrive.

To be fair  - there is one decent joke in the whole thing, when De Niro tries to contact his old CIA employers for info only to be told he can probably get what he's looking for on Google. There might also be a couple of mildly amusing segments - a play on Jaws in the ball pool and a pastiche of the classic spy tailing somebody on a train. There, I've saved you the bother of actually having to watch the film - believe me, you'll thank me for it.

Overall - 3.5/10 Unfunny, lazy, cynical, cringeworthy. From here the only way is up for the year.