De Niro works the same menacingly cheerful voodoo in Jay Roach's rambling little comedy "Meet the Parents." As Jack Byrnes, a former CIA guy who's out to make life hell for his daughter's new boyfriend, Greg (Ben Stiller), he's both inscrutable and vaguely demented, the kind of by-the-book conservative who gets a kick out of tripping people up with his mind games and razor-wire intelligence. The script by Jim Herzfeld and John Hamburg, from a story by Greg Glienna and Mary Ruth Clarke, gives Jack plenty of sharp lines, and De Niro keeps them whirring.

Jack is hardly a soft guy, but it's clear he loves his daughter, Pam (Teri Polo), and, perhaps almost as much, his snooty longhair cat, Jinxie -- he has used military-style mind-control techniques to train the furry feline to leap into his arms on command and to use the toilet.

Jack doesn't have multiple levels, but he doesn't need them: De Niro comes up with enough variations on the bare bones of the character, bouncing lightly, if mercilessly, off Stiller's hapless befuddlement as he tries to expose the sweet, considerate, love-smacked Greg as a deviant who's just not good enough for his daughter. Part of the fun is that he never allows his crew-cut-precise facade to crack, whether he's hooking up Greg to a vintage lie detector machine or dropping him off at the local drugstore and breezily announcing, "I'll meet you back out front in about 12 to 15 minutes."

"Meet the Parents" is something of a romantic comedy, but it's Jack and Greg who are the mismatched couple, only gradually and warily coming to terms with each other. As the movie opens, Greg, deeply in love with Pam, wants to propose to her. Just as he's about to pop the question he learns that Pam's sister, Debbie (Nicole De Huff), is about to get married, so he puts the idea on hold temporarily. Pam also reveals that her sister's fiancé had the good sense to ask their father for permission first, a tactic that hadn't even occurred to Greg.

When the couple arrives at Pam's family home for the wedding weekend, Greg immediately begins making gaffes and missteps; part of the fun is that we can see he's not really doing anything wrong. When he first greets Pam's parents, her mother, Dina (dryly amusing Blythe Danner), remarks on the curious smell in the air -- actually, it's the baby puke that clings to Greg's sweater after a chance encounter with an infant at the airport. He doesn't have anything to change into, as his luggage has been lost. And because he has been told that Jack is a retired rare-flower specialist, he thinks he has brought the perfect gift -- a special tulip bulb. The flower shtick was just Jack's professional cover, and Jack looks at the gift with disdain -- it's basically a pot stuffed with dirt -- and jeeringly pretends to be pleased.

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