Meet the Parents

Robert De Niro has played some of the scariest characters around. People still tremble at the thought of psychopaths like Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, Max Cody from Cape Fear or Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part 2. Now he's playing the scariest person known to any man, the suspicious father of the girl you want to marry!

The unfortunate man in question here is male nurse Greg Focker (Stiller) who realises that his live-in girlfriend's father expects to be asked for his daughter's hand before she can accept. So the two head down to the family home for what rapidly turns in to a weekend in Hell. And if Greg wasn't nervous enough already, the trail of calamity that follows him includes the discovery that his girlfriend's father (De Niro) is an ex-CIA agent with a lie detector in the basement.

Meet The Parents is one of the latest in a line of films that bases itself around a send-up of De Niro's tough guy screen persona, although it comfortably outranks peers such as Analyse This and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. This is partly because of the superb comic double-act he forms with Ben Stiller, who must be becoming the greatest portrayer of nervous boyfriends in Hollywood history after his massive success in similar parts in There's Something About Mary and Keeping The Faith.

The film makes you squirm almost intolerably at points as director Jay Roach, best known for the Austin Powers movies, slowly builds Focker's embarrassment at the trail of destruction he leaves in one of the funniest films of last year.

David Goody