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Director Todd Phillips has been around the movie-making track for quite some time now, and, after the monster success of The Hangover, he has been in the enviable position of riding that gravy train with biscuit wheels, where the studios think he can do no wrong and he can make whatever the hell he wants.
Taking the ingredients of his latest effort—his oddball star from The Hangover Zach Galifianakis, current ‘it’ man Robert Downey Jr., and a premise John Hughes used to enormous respect in the late 80s—one would think, on first hearing the combination, he was about to hit pay dirt again…
Telling the story of architect Peter, a very highly strung man whose wife (Michelle Monaghan) is due to have a baby, Due Date pits the unwitting dad-to-be against idiosyncratic force of nature Ethan (Galifianakis), a man who gets him thrown off their plane and strands him on the other side of the country with no luggage, no wallet, and no hope.
What unfolds is the basic premise of perennial classic Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, where our hero (and I use that term loosely) tries to survive his bumbling companion’s company all in order to get back to his family in time.
This is where the similarities end.
While Phillips is renowned for creating some pretty off the wall characters—and these two aren’t any different—there is a complete failure in the case of both Peter and Ethan to gain the audience’s care factor. They are both hard to relate to, with Peter coming off as downright mean at times (gut punching a ten year-old and spitting in a dog’s face) and Ethan a very similar oddball to Galifianikis’s Hangover persona (John Candy’s Del was an everyman, relatable and likeable) they just never get you rooting for them.
There are some laughs throughout, to be sure, but the characters fail to serve the film’s premise well. You simply don’t care if they make it or not, and are really just riding along to see what new disgusting situation Ethan, or his masturbating dog, is going to get them into. The film’s extremes don’t stay just with the characterizations, as its set pieces escalate to the overblown and non-relatable as well. Any attempt it makes to have heart is undermined by its many extremes.
The technical aspects of the film, unsurprisingly, are first rate; it’s a shame such a talented bunch of people didn’t work a little more on the script. Comparisons to John Hughes’s aforementioned classic are inevitable, and probably unfair, but for this reviewer, even if that great film had never existed, Due Date is just too mean-spirited to root for.
MPAA Rating: R for language, drug use and sexual content.
