Like Analyze This, Meet the Parents plays off De Niro’s intimidating reputation as a psycho/gangster/all-around badass. Here, he portrays the living embodiment of every guy’s nightmare: the girlfriend’s father.
The role certainly doesn’t make undue demands of De Niro. By playing things straight, he milks the greatest comic potential out of an uneven screenplay. (Remember: the straight man doesn’t get the laughs, but the jokes don’t work without him.) In Analyze This, De Niro proved beyond any doubt that he can be as adept at comedy as at drama, and there’s nothing in Meet the Parents to challenge that conclusion.
Unfortunately, the movie as a whole doesn’t live up to its top-billed actor’s performance. Meet the Parents is put together like a TV sit-com. Director Jay Roach, the man behind the camera for the two Austin Powers spoofs (as well as Mystery, Alaska), strings together a series of hit-and-miss lowbrow gags with little care for whether any of the connecting material is coherent, interesting, or enjoyable (in most cases, it’s none of those three).
When it’s funny, Meet the Parents can be very funny; however, there are often long stretches of filler in between the laughs. How well the film works for each individual will depend on his or her tolerance for this sort of marginal approach.