"YOU talkin' t'me? Are you talkin' t'me?"

As unhinged cabbie Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro is responsible for delivering one of the most intimidating movie lines of all time. A quarter of a century later he manages the same air of menace in Meet the Parents - it's just that you'll laugh a lot more. Much, much more.

He plays Jack Burns, for 34 years a CIA psychological profiler, and the father of Pam (Teri Polo) who has brought her may-be fiance Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) home for the weekend to meet her folks.

Jack is very much a man's man. And a conservative man's man at that. Greg is a nurse - "Not many men in that profession, Greg" - who thinks his prospective father-in-law has spent a lifetime in the rare flowers business. Somehow nobody can ever be good enough for Jack's first-born daughter and Greg certainly doesn't make the grade as all his efforts to get along with Jack go hopelessly wrong.

Saddled with a name like Focker, what other way could they go? To cap it all, Pam's middle name is Martha. (Oh, you work it out.)

Given that we've all fretted over meeting our partner's parents there's nothing particularly clever about the comedy, at least not in the oh-so-ironic, postmodern sense of funny - it is just extremely well done. Even the situation has been explored before in films like Father of the Bride, and many of the set piece gags are re-runs of comedy staples, but what sets Meet the Parents apart from a legion of lesser movies is its easy class.

Director Jay Roach keeps a lid on De Niro's considerable baggage, so that when he lets loose and fixes the camera with those eyes, the energy he emits is almost a force of nature. De Niro's measured showing is central to the comedy - and this is very funny indeed. You can feel Greg's fear, not least when Jack hooks him up to a lie detector.

For his part, Stiller is perfect as the luckless Greg, agonising in the certain knowledge that, whatever he does, he can never measure up to Jack's expectations. As his world collapses - along with Pam's sister's wedding rehearsal, an overflowing septic tank and the ashes of Jack's mother - he is left shaking his fist at the cruellest fate.

The film builds a fine head of steam, but even as it threatens to spill over into demented farce it remembers to set the groundwork for a sequel and calm the nerves with a pleasing resolution.

Brilliant.