Due Date

Jesse Thompson

Due Date Film Review

            The film Due Date is director Todd Philips follow up film to last summer's breakout highest grossing R-rated comedy of all time The Hangover.  The film follows Peter Highman, (Robert Downey Jr) an overly high strung and stressed architect on his way home to Los Angeles from Atlanta to be with his pregnant wife for the birth of their first child. That is until he crosses paths with a Mr. Ethan Tremblay, a promising young actor (in his wild imagination and one very moving medicinal enhanced rendition of Marlon Brando's iconic Godfather monologue) with a penchant for hair perms, small dogs named Sonny, good herb and mindless chatter, who is on a journey to spread his late father's ashes and make it in Hollywood by being on the TV and appearing in a sitcom like his favorite show Two and a Half Men. Peter's unfortunate encounters with Ethan at the airport and the first class cabin of the plane lead him to lose his cool with Ethan's buffoonery to where he winds up being taken out with a rubber bullet by a U.S. Air Marshall and subsequently placed on along with his new "friend" Ethan on the no fly list. Making matters worse, Peter's luggage and wallet with all his identification and money were left on the plane, and while trying to figure out a way to carjack a rental car, hesitantly takes up Ethan on his offer to accompany him and Sonny to Hollywood. When Ethan tells Peter something to the effect of, "life does crazy things like that sometimes, hop in", you know that the wild ride he is in for is just beginning and only going to get bumpier from there.

            The rest of the structure of the movie goes something like Ethan out of his child like ignorance sets up situations where chaos arises, and then Peter's quick temper often further aggravates the problem usually resulting in personal harm to his person and increasing the difficulties he will have making it see Los Angeles in time for his pregnant wife's due date. While the movies setup and the initial back and forth between Downey's straight edge character and  Galifianakis' man child oddball character of Alan from The Hangover offers plenty of laughs at the outset, there is little to no character development as the film progresses and their adventures hardly deviate from the standard fare of other road trip movies. Galifianakis's   oddball character's complete naivety of the world and the films writing is its best when its ridiculousness stays closer to the bounds of real life things to which the audience could relate, but many times in the movie it can become quickly inane and unbelievable. It's funny for example when their first stop on the road from Atlanta is to Birmingham, Alabama so that Ethan can score drugs and he remarks that the alternative pharmacist, played by Juliette Lewis, must be really legitimate since he found her on craigslist. Similarly Danny Bride's Western Union employee character Lonnie's lines about closing in five minutes at 4:35 to go kick it with his boys at Chile's restaurant and Ethan commends his foresight of making a reservation on Wednesday nights because it can get pretty busy is worth a few laughs. Downey's character is also the funniest on the occasions when he becomes mad as hell and takes the hard line lashing out at Ethan or another annoying child for the dumb stunts they pull. As Peter softens up though the lack of reference to the terrible events he's endured lend the movie little in the sense of an escalation towards an ending that mostly fizzles out.

            The movie does include some great cinematography capturing the land and cityscapes across the U.S. from Atlanta to El Paso past the Grand Canyon to finally end up in LA with all the bridges highways and rest stops with the nicest showers along the way. The scene in the Grand Canyon where Ethan says his final goodbyes to his father and spreads the ashes he's been carrying in a coffee can the whole trip is a good spectacle. If the mishaps in the movie had stopped at this point I would have been content with the happy ending of both character's having difficulties but learning important life lessons at the end of the journey, however the Ethan's big confession to Peter and the added accidental gunshot wound bring the character's back to where they started and leads to a weak and awkward ending. The movie certainly has its share of laughs when the leading duo's comic sensibilities are keen, but it's not up to par with The Hangover with just them two to keep the laughs going and unneeded cameos by Jamie Foxx not helping the issue. A funny weekend movie certainly but the film's lack of a strong finale and over reliance on Galifianakis character's quips that range from genuinely funny in the begging, to boring and tiring by the end make Due Date seem like just a short pit stop for director Todd Philips towards making his Hangover:2 film as an actual effort to top his last comedy.