Buy it... if you just can't get enough of those lazy, happy Randy Newman vocals and their fluffy, parody-filled underscore counterparts.

Avoid it... if Newman's singing began making you pull your hair out long ago and you don't need yet another slight variation on the joyful, trademark Newman attitude.

Newman

Meet the Fockers: (Randy Newman) As an overdue follow-up to the 2000 hit comedy Meet the Parents, Jay Roach's 2004 entry,Meet the Fockers, extends the characters from the first film into the realm of Greg Focker's (Ben Stiller's) parents for even more complicated fun. The entire film exists only to analyze what dysfunctional interactions happen when you put a set of highly controlling and tense parents at one side of the table and an extremely relaxed set on the other. Despite a cast of extremely powerful celebrity names, critical consensus on Meet the Fockers seemingly dwelled upon a flat lack of energy in the film, pointing to substandard writing as perhaps the primary culprit. But that certainly did not keep audiences away from the sequel, with several weeks at the #1 position in box office earning Meet the Fockers fiscal success at the very least and guaranteeing future viability for the franchise. The original film in 2000 featured a Randy Newman score and a few songs performed by the modern jazz singer himself. At the time, Newman was venturing regularly into the animated children's film domain, a place in which his lazy, upbeat vocals serve a very noble purpose. After wearing his welcome in that genre a tad thin by 2003, Newman provided a refreshingly different score (compared to his usual comedy standard) for Seabisquit. In a journey down memory lane, though, Meet the Fockers gave Newman the opportunity to slide right back into ever-familiar territory, with the filmmakers apparently deciding that the sequel required music nearly identical to what Newman had provided for the first film. So static is the personality of these scores that replacement composer Stephen Trask was specifically asked to ape an identical sound for 2010's Little Fockers (yielding predictably streamlined results). Absent from the third film are the freshly minted Newman songs appearing over the opening and closing credits of Meet the Fockers, however. Newman's parody-level score material reflects the same attitude as the songs in between, and despite the usual, upbeat nature of the composer's involvement, the straight restocking of music from the first film to the second may be one reason why critics didn't find Meet the Fockers to be as novel in its execution.

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Nothing particularly unique can be described in the characteristics of Newman's two songs for Meet the Fockers. The duo of "We're Gonna Get Married" (over the opening titles) and "Crazy 'Bout My Baby" (over the closing credits) is a bit more rock-inspired than most of Newman's film songs, but you nevertheless get the feeling that you've heard both these songs in no less than five movies in the surrounding years. He varies his tone, his lyrics, and his structures so little that you begin to wonder if he infringes upon his own copyrights at times; the songs in Meet the Fockers could have functioned just as well in A Bug's Life or Monsters Inc., and for someone who has heard all of these fluffy songs and scores countless times, Newman's voice at its saturation point may start to give a person violent thoughts. If not irritating, these songs at the very least will be boring to many listeners, and Newman, despite the success he's had in the past with his niche, has to come up with a new twist, a new set of rhythms, or vastly different instrumentation to keep himself viable in these situations. His typical, nifty little female vocals repeating his lyrics or "eeewing and ahhhing" behind him are the real kicker this time. The underscore does its best to elevate the comedy of the story by playing upon the emotional swings of the picture. With a few tepid opening tracks featuring plucky rhythms that wouldn't be foreign to an equivalent Rachel Portman score, the album would seem hopeless at first, but in Newman's latter cues, he begins to inject some much-needed parody personality into the work. An ambitious pirate-inspired brass theme in "Meet the Fockers" yields to a foreboding and militaristic Godfather spin-off in "Suspicious Mind." A touch of Hispanic flavor leaks into the score in "The Shot" and one very strong orchestral outburst steals the final score cue, "Here's My Plan." On the whole, the Newman underscore material constitutes about 20 minutes on album. Released by Varèse Sarabande, the Meet the Fockers product is nearly identical in structure to Dreamworks' album for Meet the Parents, with the Newman songs followed by score and several unrelated rock songs appearing at the end. The non-Newman songs on this album reflect the laid-back attitude of the Focker family quite well. Overall, Newman's underscore shines through at times despite its predictable parody methods, but the man simply has to diversify himself in his own vocal department. The same old song over and over again isn't making as many people smile anymore. **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Randy Newman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.06 (in 17 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.11 (in 20,737 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.