By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
A common criticism of modern comedies is that writers and directors play things too safe. That they’re afraid to push the envelope and put anything truly transgressive onscreen again. While that’s debatable, it’s hard to deny that some of the comedies from yesteryear were that much funnier because they broke all the rules and stopped at nothing to make audiences laugh. The best example of this may be Meet the Parents, a star-studded comedy now streaming on Netflix.
Meet The Parents On Netflix
Meet the Parents has a plot that is refreshingly simple and far less convoluted than your average funny film on Netflix. We follow the misadventures of a man meeting his girlfriend’s parents for the first time and hoping to earn her father’s blessing. You see, he hopes to propose to her, but he (a male nurse) and her dad (a war vet and retired CIA agent) have completely different personalities that combust onscreen in scene after hilarious scene.
If you’ve never watched Meet the Parents, one of the primary reasons to stream it on Netflix is the awesome cast, starting with Ben Stiller (best known for Tropic Thunder and Zoolander) as the nebbish boyfriend trying to impress his girlfriend’s intimidating father. That dad is played by Robert De Niro (best known for Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Cape Fear), a former CIA agent who hates his daughter’s new boyfriend. Rounding out the cast is Owen Wilson (best known for The Royal Tenenbaums and Wedding Crashers) as a wealthy, snobby ex-fiancé of the daughter and a potential rival for her affection.
Long before Meet the Parents landed on Netflix, the film made a genuine killing at the box office, earning $330.4 million against a budget of only $55 million. This theatrical success led to the film getting two sequels: Meet the Fockers and Little Fockers. It also led to a brief-lived reality show called Meet My Folks and an even briefer-lived sitcom called In-Laws, neither of which ever had much of a cultural impact.
Meet the Parents, though, made quite the impact on critics, earning an 85 percent critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In general, critics noted that the movie suffers from some occasionally grating sitcom moments but that its familial humor is hilarious and its leading actors have such great onscreen chemistry. I mostly agree with this assessment, but let’s face it…most comedy film lovers are also sitcom lovers, so the core audience isn’t likely to be put off by a movie occasionally engaging in Big Bang Theory-style joke setups and payoffs.
In fact, one of the most compelling reasons to stream Meet the Parents on Netflix is that it is beloved by general audiences. In addition to earning that aforementioned beaucoup box office, this film has an audience score of 79 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. This shows that the average moviegoer considers the movie about as fresh as professional film critics, which is a good sign for a comedy trying to appeal to as many people as possible.
If you still need more coaxing to watch Meet the Parents on Netflix, you should know that it’s a great example of a crazy Hollywood gamble actually paying off. Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro are completely different kinds of actors, and in a lesser film, their lack of having much in common might have made each of their scenes fall flat. Instead, their differences as performers help each of their scenes crackle with static electricity and unpredictability, adding the weight of surprise to every punchline.
Will you find Meet the Parents as quotably funny (“I have nipples, Greg, could you milk me?”) as I did when you watch it on Netflix or will you hate this film worse than your own in-laws? You won’t know, of course, until you stream it for yourself. If I’m a better person, though, you’ll be scrambling to watch the sequel as soon as the credits begin to roll.
