'Little Fockers' review: laughter and squirms

Comedy. Directed by Paul Weitz. Starring Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro. (PG.13. 98 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

Little Fockers" is a semi-painful, semi-amusing sequel that reunites the battling in-laws from "Meet the Parents" and its follow-up, "Meet the Fockers."

When we first meet Ben Stiller's Greg Focker, he was a nice, neurotic male nurse who submitted to lie-detector tests by Jack, his girlfriend's father - an ex-spy played by Robert De Niro in squinting-psycho mode. In the next movie, his parents meet her parents, generating loudmouth flakiness and one repulsive bowl of fondue.

As the third film opens, we find the afflicted Greg Focker and his now-wife, Pam (Teri Polo), enjoying life with 5-year-old twins. Greg seems to be getting along with his kooky father-in-law. Pam's airily obsessive ex-beau, Kevin (Owen Wilson), seems to be engaged to some babe named Svetlana. Everything seems to be fine, which, in screenwriting terms, means that everything is about to disintegrate.

Sure enough, Jack has a heart attack. After defibrillating himself with his polygraph machine, he pressures Greg to assume more responsibility as paterfamilias. "The Godfocker," Jack calls him. Then Jessica Alba arrives - as Andi Garcia, an overeager pharmaceutical rep hawking a Viagra-like pill for heart patients. And from this one can infer that some funny business involving said drug will occur.

"Little Fockers" has less to do with the littlest Fockers than the clan's developmentally stunted grown-ups, all of them behaving exactly as they've behaved in movies past. Greg is a dipstick. Jack is a nut. The women are sane but inconsequential, being forced to sit out most of the nonsense. Everyone's a little older and a little more frayed around the edges, as though they've been through this carp-and-whine-with-gay-jokes routine a few too many times.

Some of it induces laughter; some of it induces squirms. This is the first Focker installment not directed by Jay Roach, who did a good job balancing the yuks with the more outrageous gross-outs. That comic-revolting parity shouldn't be much of a challenge for "American Pie's" Paul Weitz, and yet the skeevier bits aren't especially funny.

-- Advisory: Mature sexual humor throughout, language and some drug content.

E-mail Amy Biancolli at datebookletters@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 8 of the San Francisco Chronicle