Due Date

I had read mostly mediocre review of "Due Date", so I was already going into this movie with a negative impression, but I must confess that the reviews I had read hardly paid the proper respects to this movie, because I found "Due Date" to actually be quite nice.

It is a pretty straight forward comedy movie in the likes of "Planes, Trains & Automobiles" starring Steve Martin and John Candy, so if you are familiar with that classic comedy movie and liked it, then you will definitely like "Due Date" as well.

The story, shortly put, is Peter Highman (played by Robert Downey, Jr.) getting into trouble because of Ethan Tremblay (played by Zach Galifianakis) outside the airport, and from there, the funny and awkward situations just escalate.

I found the story to be likable and funny, and there was a lot of really great humor in the movie. Again, I refer to the Steve Martin and John Candy movie. Lots of far out there situations that make you laugh and sometimes even curl your toes in disbelief. Aside from the funny moments, then there was a nice theme with friendship and differences shining through here as well.

The acting in "Due Date" was right on the money and good. Downey and Galifianakis are really working great together, Highman being the one with his life neatly planned and everything usually in place, while Tremblay's life was chaotic and in disarray.

For a comedy, then "Due Date" delivered lots of entertainment and good laughs. If you enjoy comedies with more to it than just the average drunk and teen-sex themes, then "Due Date" is well worth checking out.

I think that Due Date operates under the main premise that the viewer has never heard of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, for if they had, they'd be wondering why they were watching the same movie with all the jokes stripped out. Due Date is, in total, neither a terrible nor an offensive film. Its problem is that it's a little too bitter, thus eliminating with surgical precision any empathy we might have for its two protagonists. It's a road trip with an obvious end in sight and somewhat unpredictable wacky hijinks in between. You could do worse, but you could do much better.

Peter Highman (Robert Downey, Jr.) is an architect who's attempting to fly out of Atlanta back home to Los Angeles to be with his wife Michelle Monaghan, who's about to give birth. But thanks to a bag mixup with a fellow traveler named Ethan Trembley (Zach Galifianakis), Peter finds himself stranded in Atlanta, placed on the national No Fly list (minor misunderstanding, of course). Ethan offers him a cross-country ride in his rental, and off we go.

The movie uses the trope of mismatched people enduring a common experience. Peter is uptight, dithering endlessly about what to name his newborn. Ethan is, well, flighty. In fact, Galifianakis seems to be playing the same character he played in the two Hangover films: childlike, maybe psychopathic and/or sociopathic, not all there. He's wildly misinformed about such things as the Grand Canyon and the Hoover Dam, but he is heading west to try to make it as an actor in Hollywood. Oh, and did I mention he's carrying the ashes of his deceased father in a coffee can to dispose of along the way? Well, there's that, too.

You and I both know that there's no way Peter and Ethan will make it from Georgia to California without any problems. But Peter has no choice - his wallet was confiscated at the airport, and his bags are on their way to LA. He has no cash and no ID. It could happen to anyone. So he's essentially at Ethan's mercy. Along the way, we learn much about the characters and what makes them tick, but whereas the earlier Planes, Trains got melancholy without getting maudlin, this one achieves no such feat.

Downey, Jr. and Galifianakis give it their best shot, and to tell the truth they're not bad. They make an okay team; it's just that it's a teaming we've seen before, and much better. Steve Martin and John Candy got into their share of situations that would never happen to a normal person, but they also ran into problems with which we could all relate; here, it's more of the former than the latter. It's as if the movie keeps daring itself to get weirder and weirder.

The final, near-fatal flaw of the movie is that it really doesn't give you anyone to root for - except of course at the end. It's a comedy, after all. But these guys do some rather nasty things to each other, and not in the oh-no-he-didn't sort of way, either; rather, in the scowling, almost hateful way. It's a little disconcerting at times. But the actors do their best, as I said, and you could do worse.

Decent watch, probably won't watch again, and can't whole-heartedly recommend.

This is an interesting movie to look at critically. The writing, mostly in the character work, feels weak. It actually has an interesting plot, for the most part: an idiot, through deceit, drags a jerk with him on a cross country road trip. It's a decent story, and I'd like to think of it as an spiritual predecessor to "The Hangover". The problem I have with it is that it feels like if there were better actors, then the characters would sell better. Then I remember it was Robert Downey Jr and Zach Galifinakas, and I'm not sure how much "better" you can get for these characters, meaning that they've probably already elevated the characters somewhat.

It feels like a lot of the movie is unnecessary, like antithetical Chekov's guns. Either it's for a tiny one time joke with little payoff, or it's part of a lot of work for situational comedy.

An example would be the dog, it really only has one significant joke in the entire movie (maybe 2), otherwise it's just a lot of maintenance.

The coffee can on the other hand is repetitively used to throughout the movie as it's part of the character themes.

I'm not saying it's not funny, if you like "Anger Management", then you might like this one, but I just think there are a lot better movies out there to watch.

Due Date is a comedy of mass frustration. I'm not just talking about what happens to the characters in the film, no, this is simply a frustrating comedy sit through. Here is an all-too-familiar road picture that pins together two people who hate each other and sends them cross-country on a madcap adventure. Needless to say, one guy is an average Joe that we identify with and the other is a blithering idiot who makes every moment a nonstop irritation. If this sounds, at all like the great Planes, Trains and Automobiles, you're not far off the mark.

That earlier movie was a great American comedy. It was funny and endearing because we cared about both parties. We wanted to see Steve Martin get home and we cared about John Candy's shower ring salesman despite all his goofy inefficiencies. Here the Martin role is filled by a very sour Robert Downey Jr. as Peter Highman, an uptight yuppie on his way from Atlanta to Los Angelas to witness the birth of his first child. The John Candy role is filled by Zach Galifianakis, as Ethan, an irritant on two legs who gets Peter thrown off the plane when he won't stop saying the word "bomb". Neither of these two characters are really funny enough to spend any amount of time with.

Peter is probably a nice guy. He seems to care about his wife but he spends the entire movie in a state of boiling anger and that's probably because he is saddled with a guy so insufferable that he could turn even the gentlest soul into a state of rage. Through a series of mishaps, mostly thanks to Ethan's idiocy, they get into every kind of trouble including: A fight with a veteran in a wheelchair; vehicular theft at the Mexican border; a shooting; a car accident; and questions about whether Peter's wife is pregnant with his child.

None of this stuff is really funny. It all seems episodic and some of it is quite violent and unpleasant. I think some of the comic energy that should make these scenes work is missing. We cringe when we should be laughing. I also think that most of the film's failure falls on the head of actor Zach Galifianakis who always seems to illicit the same effect on me as a noisy car alarm. I have seen him in three films now and he always plays the same annoying character: An oddball doofus who has a never-ending repertoire of annoying and disgusting habits. Ethan is a pothead with an annoying dog and even more annoying habits - all of which get under Peter's skin and sadly ours too. His presence, I swear, brings this movie to a dead stop and since he occupies at least 90% of it, you can imagine how unpleasant this movie is.

Due Date was directed by Todd Phillips, who made The Hangover, one of my favorite films of recent years. What that film had was a collection of likable characters and a narrative structure that pulled us from beginning to end. Here his story an episodic series of annoying moments and mean-spirited characters. It ranges from disgusting to irritating to violent and finally soft and cuddly. The problem is that very very rarely ever funny.

** (of four)

Due Date. Me, my friend and the dog. A funny comedy about two "friends" who travel across the country with a dog. Robert Downey Jr. And Zach Galifianakis performed their roles perfectly and complemented each other.