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An interminable road trip best avoided
By Christy Lemire |
November 14, 2010, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
ROBERT Downey Jr is miserable, stuck on a cross-country drive with a creepy Zach Galifianakis in the comedy "Due Date." And it's easy to imagine how he feels: It's often torturous just sitting through the movie, and we're not the ones trapped in the middle of Texas with the guy.
The script is by director Todd Phillips, hot off the success of "The Hangover," and three other writers. But "Due Date" is without the consistent hilarity and originality of that last-summer hit; it's got some individual laughs here and there but lacks sufficient story or character development to hold the whole endeavor together.
And it's not as if "Due Date" were all that complicated - it shouldn't have been so difficult to get right. It's a simple mismatched-buddy road trip movie, the kind you've seen countless times before. Downey plays Peter Highman, an architect whose wife (Michelle Monaghan) is about to give birth to their first child. Galifianakis plays Ethan Tremblay, a clueless aspiring actor Peter bumps into, literally, at the airport in Atlanta.
Through a series of massive contrivances - the kind that plague the entire journey - Peter and Ethan are kicked off the plane and forced to share a rental car all the way back to Los Angeles. This includes a stop for Ethan to pick up some medical marijuana, an awkward afternoon with Peter's wife's ex-boyfriend and an unplanned and unwise excursion across the Mexican border at night.
The comparison has been made between "Due Date" and "Planes, Trains & Automobiles," but it's actually got more "Rain Man" in it: Peter has his perfect life upended by a demanding, overgrown child with a heart of gold (or so we're meant to believe - Ethan's more annoying than anything else).
You would not want to drive down the street with this guy, much less across the country, which makes "Due Date" feel interminable.
The script is by director Todd Phillips, hot off the success of "The Hangover," and three other writers. But "Due Date" is without the consistent hilarity and originality of that last-summer hit; it's got some individual laughs here and there but lacks sufficient story or character development to hold the whole endeavor together.
And it's not as if "Due Date" were all that complicated - it shouldn't have been so difficult to get right. It's a simple mismatched-buddy road trip movie, the kind you've seen countless times before. Downey plays Peter Highman, an architect whose wife (Michelle Monaghan) is about to give birth to their first child. Galifianakis plays Ethan Tremblay, a clueless aspiring actor Peter bumps into, literally, at the airport in Atlanta.
Through a series of massive contrivances - the kind that plague the entire journey - Peter and Ethan are kicked off the plane and forced to share a rental car all the way back to Los Angeles. This includes a stop for Ethan to pick up some medical marijuana, an awkward afternoon with Peter's wife's ex-boyfriend and an unplanned and unwise excursion across the Mexican border at night.
The comparison has been made between "Due Date" and "Planes, Trains & Automobiles," but it's actually got more "Rain Man" in it: Peter has his perfect life upended by a demanding, overgrown child with a heart of gold (or so we're meant to believe - Ethan's more annoying than anything else).
You would not want to drive down the street with this guy, much less across the country, which makes "Due Date" feel interminable.
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