Meet the Parents (2000) on Netflix
Greg Focker, a nurse, wants to marry his girlfriend Pam and seeks her father Jack's blessing. Jack, a retired CIA operative, distrusts him and puts him through a lie detector test.
- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb7.0/10382,077 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes85%
Trailer
Plot summary
Greg Focker is a nurse in Chicago who has been dating Pam Byrnes for ten months and wants to marry her. He decides to ask her father Jack for his blessing at the Long Island home where Pam's sister Debbie is about to be married. Airport security makes him check the bag holding the engagement ring, and the airline loses it. Jack presents himself as a retired florist but is in fact a former CIA operative, and he is critical of Greg's work as a nurse. He watches Greg closely, testing him with a lie detector. Pam's ex-fiancé Kevin, the best man at Debbie's wedding, is still on friendly terms with the family.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Meet the Parents (2000)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The role of Pam Byrnes, Greg's girlfriend, was initially given to British actress Naomi Watts, but she ultimately lost it to Teri Polo because the filmmakers “didn't think [Watts] was sexy enough”.
- Steven Spielberg wanted to direct and produce the film with Jim Carrey playing Greg Focker, and Universal's new interest in that pairing added to its reluctance to give the project to Roach; Spielberg and Carrey never took it past the planning stages.
- Herzfeld and Roach both confirmed that, after committing to the project and reviewing the script, De Niro was the person who came up with the idea for the famous polygraph test scene.
- Jim Carrey came up with the Focker surname in a creative session before he abandoned the project, and the MPAA later questioned it as possibly an expletive, putting the film in danger of an R rating. The studio submitted a list of real people with the surname Focker, which kept its PG-13.
- On 18 July 2005 an American Airlines flight was diverted back to Fort Lauderdale after a flight attendant found a crumpled napkin that read, “Bomb, bomb, bomb...meet the parents”. The plane was met by a bomb squad and the FBI, whose agents questioned its 176 passengers about the note.
