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Little Fockers: (Stephen Trask) If only audiences
had common sense, movies like
Little Fockers might not have to
exist. Following the stunning success of
Meet the Parents in 2000
and
Meet the Fockers in 2004, it was a foregone conclusion that
another film in the franchise would be attempted to continue milking
this cash cow. Once an obstinate Dustin Hoffman finally agreed to
reprise his role in 2010's
Little Fockers, the production
commenced and continued to tell the tale of two families converged
comically through marriage. This time around, the Byrnes and Focker
families deal with issues of divorce and death, with new characters now
muddying the narrative waters while old ones stubbornly written to
continue soliciting the laughs of yesteryear. Reactions from critics to
the new script were overwhelmingly negative, and their reviews
consequently blasted
Little Fockers with few exceptions. Despite
that warning, audiences were lured by the ensemble cast once more,
earning the movie roughly the same impressive worldwide grosses as the
first film in the franchise (though failing to reach the half-billion
dollars that the 2004 entry managed to reach). While Jay Roach had
produced and directed the previous two films, he stepped back to a
production role only for
Little Fockers, with Paul Weitz taking
the helm of the third entry. Along with that switch came a change in
composers. The legendary Randy Newman had provided the score and songs
to the franchise thus far, largely emulating his style and general
approach to animation films. His efforts yielded predictable three-star
results at best, the music never establishing much thematic identity outside of
the consistency in the composer's mannerisms. His songs and score for
Meet the Fockers were both increasingly generic, the songs mere
echoes of the composer's great moments of the past and the score filled
with tired parody material worthy of a second-rate cartoon. Replacing
Newman for
Little Fockers is Weitz collaborator Stephen Trask, a
young American composer with a rising profile whose most notable
assignments of recent years are the functional but largely underwhelming
The Vampire's Assistant in 2009 and the safely pleasant
The
Back-Up Plan in 2010. Not surprisingly, Trask doesn't attempt to
break any new ground with
Little Fockers, yielding an appropriate
but unmemorable sound for a franchise sadly without consistent thematic
development over its history.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Trask's music
for
Little Fockers is how much parts of it emulate Newman's
general sound for the franchise, even if specific melodic ideas aren't
maintain and nurtured to any degree. The entirety of this score sounds
like an identical copy of
The Back-Up Plan but with several
homages to Newman along the way. The idea of using Latin flamenco
elements and a host of instrumental parodies of
The Godfather
throughout the score are not new, and Trask revisits those techniques
without really extending them much further. Newman's swashbuckling-like
orchestral flair at times is not really a factor here, though; Trask
does have moments when fully-rounded orchestral performances come into
play, but never really outside of parody mode. The most outward
expression of personality, and perhaps another nod to Newman, is Trask's
new primary identity for the franchise, "Greg's Theme." The performances
of this jazzy piece for the opening titles and then in "Greg's Jam" at
the end of the album whip with piano, Hammond organ, guitar, trumpet,
and/or clapping effects in such a way as to clearly overshadow the rest
of the score. Hearing the enthusiasm and dexterity of Trask's impressive
piano performances in these cues makes one wonder why such spirit was
absent from most of the rest of the score. After this opening salvo of
pizzazz, the score becomes stuck in the parodies of
The Godfather
and smooth Latin tones before tepidly exploring background instrumentals
of marginal interest. Moments of accelerated rhythms, choral backing
(seemingly synthetic), or electronically sampled loops guiding the
ensemble are the highlights, "Early Human School Industrial Reel" an
injection of life. After countless filler cues from
The Back-Up
Plan comes "Suite: Piece of Cake/Land Shark/Suck It!/Meow/Schtupp,"
which devolves into a series of massive parody cliches. Some redemption
comes in the lightly noble symphonic rendition of Greg's theme in "The
Gregfocker." Between the mutilation of a Christmas carol in "Oy Vey,
Christmaka" and the unfathomably awful "Byrnes, Jack Byrnes Remix,"
containing quotes from the film to rhythms by Joseph Bonn, the album
ends somewhat badly. The final track offers two different mixes of the
snazzy opening theme, however. Overall,
Little Fockers does its
job effectively and sprinkles in a few highlights that rival Newman's
music for the franchise, but the sum is so derivative of that
predecessor's material and Trask's own
The Back-Up Plan that it
all seems redundant, perhaps by necessity.
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The insert includes a list of performers, but no extra information
about the score or film.
