THERE are lies, damned lies - and box office statistics.
MEET THE FOCKERS (12A) has taken $240m (£130m) across the pond in just five weeks. That makes the Meet the Parents' sequel the highest-grossing live action comedy in US box office history behind only Home Alone.
It's official! Your total fun is guaranteed by popular demand!
In truth, there have been lots of funnier films since 1990, from Jack Nicholson's multi-Oscar winning As Good As It Gets to Meet the Parents itself.
After Shrek 2 and Spider-Man 2 showed how good writing can maintain credibility and move a plot on, Meet the Fockers is a merely-competent sequel that's also an unnecessary 12 minutes longer than the 103-minute original.
Returning director Jay Roach (from Austin Powers' trilogy fame) treads water, despite having the fresh impetus of fading superstars Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand coming aboard as rival parents Bernie and Roz Focker.
The plot is so weak that it almost turns Robert De Niro's character Jack Byrnes into the equivalent of a retired James Bond crossed with inventor Q. Our former CIA agent is now driving a gadget-laden coach to the Fockers' holiday paradise.
Meet the Parents worked in December 2000 because it felt relatively real and the characters stood up to be counted. Here, De Niro is too quick to reprise Byrne's famous two-finger routine before a new baby grandson offers some completely insignificant laughs with his 'Look Who's Doing Sign Language' scenes.
Hoffman, another veteran Oscar-winning star, is almost on heat as the father of Ben Stiller's male nurse.
But the new Fockers are never as credible as the Byrnes in the first movie, especially as poodle-cut Miss Streisand is clearly happy to continue doing as little as possible.
This is only the third time we've seen her in 18 years, and the first since The Mirror Has Two Faces looked like it had been filmed through Vaseline-coated lenses back in 1996.
Meet the Fockers has got plenty of crowd-pleasing incidental laughs but no surprises up its sleeve from new writers John Hamburg and Jim Herzfeld.
And the closing outtakes are dire, far less entertaining than the incredible list of hairdressers, stylists, assistants and stand-ins for the main stars. They'll all be the ones doing the most laughing this weekend - all the way to the bank.
