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)
