I like comedy of all types but I am really into awkward comedy. Things that make me cringe make me laugh more quickly and consistently than most other types of comedy and slapstick is another favorite. These are what drew me to Meet the Parents and, to a lesser extent, Meet the Fockers. I really loved watching Ben Stiller’s Greg Focker squirm as everything went wrong. So when a new movie in the series was announced I was pretty excited. Sadly, this excitement was misplaced.

Little Fockers picks up as Greg (Stiller) and Pam (Teri Polo) are preparing to have a big fifth birthday party for their twins and Greg’s father in law Jack Byrnes (Robert De Niro) suffers a minor heart attack and begins worrying about his family’s legacy now that the revered Dr Bob is out of the picture due to infidelity. Jack confides in Greg that he has to be ready to take up the mantel just as Greg gets involved in doing some promotional lectures for erection medicine and finds himself in close quarters with the drug rep pushing it, the massively hot Andi Garcia (Jessica Alba). Throw in Kevin (Owen Wilson) going through some kind of existential crisis after his wedding proposal is rejected and Greg’s dad Bernie ( Dustin Hoffman) off in Spain trying to find his true north through dance and you have a recipe for wacky disaster.

There are a lot of things wrong with Little Fockers but the first and most important is that the film feels very unnecessary and inorganic. The previous sequel built off of a progression that made sense. The two families coming together and it being a disaster is a fairly natural move that follows in a reasonable way from the horrible disaster that was Greg meeting his fiance’s family. Little Fockers feels like a premise merely tacked on and shoe-horned into a well worn formula in a fairly desperate money grab. Nothing in Little Fockers feels like a natural progression from anything and it is an ill fitting mess.

Further, character development is absurd as already extreme characters are distended way out of the ball park of what is even vaguely reasonable. Jack Byrnes went from over-protective and suspicious to full on psycho. This dude is straight crazy now and it stops being funny and gets into horrifying and unbelievable. The previous films were never super realistic but at the least they were grounded on a foundation that was somewhat reasonable. The events of this movie are so unlikely it may very well have been science fiction.

The story feels like an excuse to shove characters together and comes off more workmanlike than inspired. Why does Kevin show up to passively woo Pam with his easy, off the cuff charm? Because that is how they could bring Owen Wilson back. Bernie going off to Spain was an excuse to excise his character from the movie when Dustin Hoffman didn’t want to participate and then became a stumbling block when he agreed to film some scenes. Also, for a movie called Little Fockers, the titular Fockers are barely dealt with in the movie. The primary story ark that the daughter has is that she learns it hurts Daddy’s feelings when she gives him the silent treatment.

All that would be fine if the jokes worked but for the most part they do not. Either the awkwardness is ratcheted up way too high where it stops being funny and begins being legitimately uncomfortable or they hammer the audience with the same juvenile puns over and over again. Jack suggesting that Greg is now the ‘Godfocker’ is mildly amusing the first time you hear it but having it repeated several times in rapid succession within a five minute period becomes very annoying and you see how stupid the pun was in the first place when it hijacked a laugh out of you. This convention goes on and on in it the movie with punchlines to bad jokes are repeated so many times that you want to set the theater on fire.

Even the slapstick here crosses well beyond the range of acceptably silly and into ‘seriously? She dove into an empty dirt pit with nothing but her underwear on and then smacks her head on a rock where she will lay unconscious until the script tells her it is okay to get up?’ I am not coming to a film like this for realism but there has to be a point where someone has to say enough is enough.

There are laughs to be had here and occasionally some of the old spark would show from the first two efforts and those moments were a welcome respite from the otherwise horrible and neigh unto unwatchable segments that surround them. I genuinely enjoy these characters and when they are presented with worthwhile material they can be a lot of fun but when they are presented with absolute bullshit like this  there is not much that can be done about it. Jessica Alba is as hot as hot as the day is long but she was pretty annoying here and given that is a major plot point of the movie, her presence really does a lot to undermine the film altogether.

Conclusion [4.0 out of 10]

Little Fockers could have been something good if they had put together a film that flowed in an intelligent way from previous efforts in the series but instead it settled for the lowest common denominator and just didn’t try. There are laughs and some genuinely funny moments but those are few and far between. There just didn’t seem to be much effort here and that lack of effort showed in a very big way. It is sad, but this movie should be avoided at all cost.