MartinHafer According to IMDB's trivia, Premiere Magazine listed this among their '50 best comedies ever'....though after seeing the movie, I have no idea why. Sure, it's a nice film but nothing more. And, with my expectations set that high, I felt a tad disappointed. A young couple are getting married. Unfortunately, the groom's father, Vince (Peter Falk) comes off as a real weirdo and the bride's father, Sheldon (Alan Arkin), thinks Vince is a real flake. What he doesn't know is that he's also very dangerous and soon involves Sheldon in an international plot to destroy the world's economy....via a weird dictator in the land of Tijada and with the help of the CIA.This buddy comedy is pleasant but I remember no deep belly laughs. This is NOT to fault the movie makers....they did a decent job. Overall, worth seeing...just don't expect as much as you might have been led to believe.

gjenevieve I watched this movie when it first came out. My mom and I laughed so hard throughout the whole thing. Peter Falk and Alan Arkin are superb! They make the best comedic pair and both played their parts perfectly.I saw that they remade this with Albert Brooks and Michael Douglas. It was a good and entertaining movie but not nearly as funny as this one. I just finished watching the remake and saw that this original was available on Amazon Prime so I watched it. It is just as funny today as it was when I first saw it.Serpentine! Serpentine! LOL You must watch this movie. It is pure genius.

avgalia I do not want to be too harsh because perhaps when this movie was filmed some scenes that are too familiar in today's American movies were somehow original, but even so I believe that by 1979 it was quite common to see American movies with cars chasing each other and so on. But leaving that aside, it is quite difficult to swallow that an educated dentist would accept leaving his office in the middle of an intervention to make a favour to a guy that he hardly knew. And this is how all begins. So, the script has an original sin... Nevertheless, there are some good gags and a very good performance by Alan Arkin. And of course, the usual display of utter ignorance of Americans about the culture of the other American countries. For instance to make the Hondureans speak Spanish as if they were Mexicans.

dimplet The In Laws could use some improvement. The secondary dialog could have been clever and interesting, but instead seems like filler. And the secondary acting is merely adequate.What makes The In Laws worth watching is the interaction between Peter Falk and Alan Arkin, two great actors. It is the yin and the yang, the hot and the cool. And when you listen to them, particularly early on, it seems like improv. They really are reacting to each other.The plot is a bit contrived, and makes little pretense of realism after awhile. But it works. You really don't know what, exactly, Falk is doing, and which side he is on, or even whether he is just crazy. That is fundamental to the movie.Once they arrive in South America the roots of the movie become clear. This is a revamping of ideas from Woody Allen's Bananas - 1971, particularly the crazy dictator, and the American accidentally caught up in Banana Republic politics. Then the style of The Inlaws makes sense: the lightweight acting, the silliness and absurdity. It is a genre where the bar is set fairly low, but not as low as some of the so-called comedies that followed.My favorite part, aside from the banter between Falk and Arkin, is the bit where James Hong gives a one-on-one "flight attendant" spiel to Arkin in Chinese.Of course, Richard Libertini is great as the cracked general.