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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.

If there was one downside to come out of director Todd Phillips' magnum opus The Hangover, it's that every film he would lend his name to in the future would inevitably be compared to it, and it's fair to say Due Date comes up short in that regard. Saying that, the film has its strengths and the cast delivers an above-average final product, but it does little to stand out amongst most other comedies released in the last decade.

Downey Jnr. plays highly-strung expectant father Peter Highman, whose confrontation with Galifianakis' Ethan Tremblay at the airport results in both men being placed on a no-fly list. With no identification or cash to his name, Peter has no choice but to hitch a ride with Ethan if he wants to get to Los Angeles in time for the birth of his child. Ethan, meanwhile, has plans of making it big in Hollywood as a recurring character on Two And A Half Men, thus fulfilling his lifelong dream.

It almost goes without saying that this film would fall flat if chemistry between the two leads was lacking. Thankfully, both Downey Jnr. and Galifianakis, two of the more comically capable actors of their generation, do a respectable job with their characters. Ethan is particularly well crafted as an individual both physically and verbally funny, but at the same time one who harbours a deep emotional emptiness due to an innate need to make his late father proud of him.

Due Date must have felt like a reunion of sorts for Downey Jnr., who appears alongside three former co-stars in Michelle Monaghan (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang), Jamie Foxx (The Soloist) and my favourite actress Juliette Lewis (Natural Born Killers). The first two fill their roles to satisfaction, but I was disappointed with how Lewis was used. Portraying a drug dealer supplying Ethan, who uses marijuana to 'deal with his glaucoma', her role is disappointingly minor, especially considering rumours that her character was meant to be an extension of Heidi from Old School, an earlier, and very funny, Phillips comedy.

For the most part, the film operates as a road trip comedy with a simple plot, which allows it to deviate from the story frequently to deliver humorous set pieces not at all relevant to the final scene. The best example is an escape plan hatched by Ethan to break Peter out of a detention centre when he is suspected of being an illegal immigrant. Of course, the scene plays out in the most ridiculous fashion, and requires a massive suspension of disbelief. But, pointless as they may be, these gags are tolerable due to the light-hearted context of the film, even if some jokes are hit and miss depending on your taste in humour and sense of political correctness.

More than once, you get the impression that Phillips and the rest of the crew are just going through the motions, putting a slightly new spin on otherwise recycled comedy. Overall, however, Due Date concludes nicely, delivering no more and no less that what should be expected.

*There's nothing I love more than a bit of feedback, good or bad. So drop me a line on jnatsis@iprimus.com.au and let me know what you thought of my review.*

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 takes a while to really find it's footing and it's humour but once it does it offers a really good comedy with enough great laughs and memorable set pieces in director and co-writer Todd Philips' classically mean spirited style as well as surprising emotional heft.

Robert Downey Jr. Gives a great lead performance, successfully leaning into a different kind of comedy. Zach Galifianakis plays squarely to his strengths with a character that is almost identical to his iconic Hangover character, for better and for worse.

Todd Philips' direction is really good, the film looks nice overall with some surprising scale and relatively epic set pieces. The soundtrack is another memorable part, a solid selection fo songs that definitely make the adventure more enjoyable.