Robert De Niro is wonderful as a hopeful suitor's worst nightmare of a prospective father-in-law in this all-out comedy, and as in There's Something About Mary, Ben Stiller is just great as a guy with good intentions and a knack for getting into absurdly escalating trouble. Meet the Parents is less gross and less funny, not that the two are correlated, but it still has a lot more comic energy than most modern comedies, and it knows how to channel it. It understands that what's funny is people, not people trying to be funny.