Ron Livingston, star of the cult-hit "Office Space", bottoms out with this slapstick comedy which takes satiric aim at trailer-park yahoos but, alas, fails to be ironic or nostalgic--and appears to have been made by just the kind of low-class people it pokes fun at. Livingston is a hole in the screen playing a mild-mannered psychologist--the author of a new self-help book about anger-management--who finds out from his upper-crust, boorish family that he was adopted after his biological folks left him on their doorstep; worse, his birth parents turn out to be brawling, obnoxious hicks Danny DeVito and Kathy Bates. An utterly predictable and dispiriting comedy. One waits in anticipation for the first crotch jab (19mns in), the first reference to either Jerry Springer or "Hee-Haw" (both clock in around the 60mn mark), and the proverbial cameo by a well-known talk-show host (this time it's Star Jones!). A few mindlessly funny one-liners; otherwise, flop makes "Meet the Fockers" look like "Wuthering Heights". *1/2 from ****
Review of Relative Strangers
