Video: Meet the parents

By EWAN McDONALD

(Herald rating: * * * *)

You laughin' at me? You have to turn around one of Robert De Niro's most remembered lines — snarled by Travis Bickle, the explosive psychopath of Taxi Driver — to understand just how the greatest living movie actor has turned his career on its head.

The man who played a scary loser in the ironically titled The King Of Comedy has, over the past few years, become a real king of comedy as Wag The Dog, Analyze This and this box-office smash run parallel to his better-known career as Godfather and psycho.

Awkward Jewish male nurse Greg (Ben Stiller) from Detroit wants to marry blond middle-class Wasp Pamela (Teri Polo), who teaches at a fancy Chicago pre-school.
When she takes him to meet her parents on Long Island, the airline loses Greg's suitcase, with his clothes, toilet bag and engagement ring, but that's soon going to be the least of his worries.

Pam's mother, Dina (Blythe Danner), is a nice middle-class mum but her father, Jack Byrnes (De Niro), is a monster.

Jack and Dina find it hard to cope with Greg's Jewishness, background and job.

Then there's his name. "It's pronounced the way it's spelled — F-O-C-K-E-R," says Greg. Pam's parents realise that if the wedding goes ahead their daughter will become Pamela Martha Focker.

Jack's questions of Greg are not the usual father-in-law/son-in-law chats. Jack is a retired psychological profiler for the CIA who spent a year in a North Vietnamese prison camp. He straps Greg up to the polygraph in his den to ask, "Are you sleeping with my daughter?" and "Have you ever watched a pornographic video?"

Greg smashes the urn containing Jack's mother's ashes with a champagne cork, injures Pamela's sister playing volleyball, loses the family cat, starts a fire, turns the garden into a swamp by overflowing a septic tank and is suspected of (shock! horror!) being a pothead.

Then there's the competition from Pam's rich, kind, brilliant ex (Owen Wilson), who has become Jack's close friend.

Okay, it's starting to sound like so many recent banalties out of America, but Stiller, De Niro and Austin Powers director Jay Roach combine to make a funny, knowing comedy — with an ending which says, "Just wait for the sequel."

Running time: 108 mins
Rental: Now