Grade: B+
I remember being a kid and sorting through the mail to find the latest version of America Online just waiting for me. At first I always thought it was so cool how quickly they were able to churn out what I believed to be a better and cooler product every year or so, with version 2.0 followed up by 3.0, 3.0 by 4.0 and so on and so forth. As I got older though, I started to realize, “Hey, wait a second… each new version is more or less the old one, but with a new color scheme and different names for the same old tools.”
On the flip side, as I got older I remember thinking how dumb it was for Apple to release a new iPod every year that essentially had the same functions as the old models, but was in color or smaller. Then I saw the iPhone and realized that little changes along the way led to a big pay off after all.
I bring all this up because with “Due Date,” the new film from Todd Phillips of last year’s “The Hangover,” your enjoyment of the film is going to hinge on whether or not you buy it as nothing more than “The Hangover 1.5” or a full-blown revamp of how little plot but lots of laughs with the right people can go a long way.
Plot-wise, “Due Date” follows your basic layout for a standard buddy road-trip comedy to a “T.”
Peter Highman (Robert Downey Jr.) is your typical, high-strung career traveler who’s got a quick wit and an even quicker temper. Really, this translates to Downey being Tony Stark without the Iron Man suit.
Peter, through a series of unfortunate events, meets Ethan Tremblay, a zany aspiring actor who defies any easy characterization as to exactly who he is. Ethan is played by Zach Galifianakis, who audiences are most likely to remember as the wacky, creepy Alan Garner who also defies characterization in “The Hangover.”
Peter and Ethan wind up colliding after a terrorism-related set of circumstances, and they have to make their way across the country under the guise of “Golly, will this oddball couple ever be able to work out their differences and work together to get from Atlanta to L.A. in time to see Peter’s wife give birth to his child?” In short, “Due Date” is a film with a single-sentence plot that tries to stretch that out over the course of 100 minutes.
So, why does it work? Downey and Galifianakis.
No, the idea of putting a funny cool guy with an oddball weirdo is nothing new, and in fact Phillips, again, did this with Galifianakis and Bradley Cooper in “The Hangover.” What’s so different here? With all due respect to Cooper, Downey is, frankly, a more interesting actor whose cockiness and smarm come across far more cool and hip than the crude and immature traits Cooper played up with his Phil in last year’s film. Peter Highman is, to be fair, more interesting a character than Phil Wenneck, but Downey turns a relatively stock character and uses every second of screen time to convince you that he is more than just a fast-talking jerk, and, for the most part, succeeds.
Galifianakis doesn’t have to compare to anyone else but himself, and his struggle resides in making Ethan Tremblay more than just Alen Garner with a dog instead of a baby.
I had the pleasure of seeing Galifianakis go beyond his usual shtick in this year’s more serious “It’s Kind of a Funny Story,” where he combined angst, hurt and mental illness to his base wackiness, and struck a real nerve in doing so. Here, in far funnier territory, he manages to make Ethan not only funnier, but more of a lost soul than the borderline-sociopath Alen ever was. There’s real strength in Ethan, and Galifianakis makes him somebody you want to root for, even when he makes some terrible, terrible decisions, of which there are lots.
It’s an ingenious pairing of two men who are close to the top of the acting ladder right now, and their chemistry is perfect, which is perhaps what leads to the decisive factor on where you might fall regarding “Due Date.” The film is entirely them being together, and that’s really it. With four credited writers on the script, you’ll start to wonder if they just holed up together for a month and wrote down as many funny situations they could think of putting Downey and Galifianakis together and came up with the “due date” itself to string it all together.
However, sloppiness is abound in “Due Date,” as storylines are tossed in and out like nothing, with a Jamie Foxx cameo seemingly useless to the grand scheme of the film, as well as some very obvious inconsistencies with character location. One minute, Peter and Ethan are traveling in the Texas desert, but in the car, they’re surrounded by a woodland forest; at times they’ll be alone on a dark highway in the middle of nowhere, only to be seen surrounded by cars and traffic when inside the vehicle. It doesn’t make or break the film, but at the same time, this combined with the complete and total lack of any real story shows how rushed an effort this may have been.
To finish with my original point, what you’ll have to decide is this: Is “Due Date” just a minor upgrade from “The Hangover” that exists for no other reason than to tide audiences over until next summer when “The Hangover Part II” is out in theaters? Or is “Due Date” the iPhone of this mini-genre of gentlemanly debauchery, taking a formula that works, and while holding on to the core essentials, creating something along the way that is exciting, interesting and in some ways a blue print which others can follow for years to come? I can’t make that decision for you, but for me, “Due Date” gave me more belly laughs and elicited more “oh wow” moments than “The Hangover” ever did, and in spite of its sloppiness, I can only hope we get to watch Ethan and Peter make their way back across the U.S. sooner rather than later.
Contact the critic at vburnton@asu.edu
