scraping the bottom of the crap barrel

Rating: Null/10 (2 May 2001)

I can barely describe how bad this movie is. There are movies that are bad, but are still fun. Then there are films like this-"shining" examples of mediocrity and crushing banality that make you root for a plague to wipe out a good portion of the world's population, just so the "lowest common denominator" is represented by a smaller number of people.
This is one of those situations where I am forced to believe that someone must have had compromising pictures of Robert DeNiro with an underaged goat to get him to appear in this picture. You know the basic plot, so I will, instead, list a number of details (that in an actually funny film, would not have distracted me) that annoyed me to no end, and exemplify just how little thought went into this movie:1)DeNiro's character has supposedly spent his entire life undercover as a trader in rare plants, but can't recognize an orchid (might this astounding lack of knowledge ever have compromised his secrecy?); 2)He also seems to have collected "tourist" photos of himself standing beside very influential foreign leaders (again, would a real secret agent do this?);3)and anyway, does the CIA, or FBI just let you take home their equipment?
Ben Stiller, on the other hand, seems to be singlehandedly leading the crusade to destroy the stereotype that the Jewish culture has a uniquely funny, and intelligent take on life (Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Gene Wilder, etc.). Here, he is just grating. Not a single line of dialogue exists in this film for any reason other to set up another lame joke. And since the upcoming joke is painfully obvious, it's never funny. It's just painful. This is the sort of film, that if it were an animal, you would beat to death with a shovel just to put it out of its misery, and not feel too broken up about it afterwards.
This is the stinking sludge of our strip-mall, brain-dead culture, written by your drunken frat-brother who thinks that septic-tank overflows and guys named "Focker" are the height of "edgy". It's worse than bad-it's a bad film convinced that it's hilarious. Avoid it like crap-on-a-stick.