Before I sat down to write this review I checked over on Rotten Tomatoes to see how this movie was doing with critics overall. I was kind of initially shocked to see that it was sitting only at 39%. If this were school, that grade would be beyond failing. Is this innocuous little road/buddy comedy I just saw really that much of a failure that it only deserves a 39%? I don’t think so. But I guess I can kind of understand why it scored so poorly. Just last year the director Todd Phillips scored huge with The Hangover. When all was said and done that movie became the highest grossing comedy of all time (or so I read somewhere). Not to mention that it took a comedian who was previously thought of as being underground and alternative in Zach Galifianakis and turned him into a household name. Well, if you’re talking about a frat house, but regardless, the guy is now super famous and is going to be in about a thousand movies over the next few years, and it’s all because of what he and Phillips did collaborating on The Hangover. When I heard that the two were working together on another film, just a year later, and they were getting Robert Downey Jr. in on the fun, I was immediately on board. When the trailer hit and it was filled to the brim with gags that hit their mark the deal was sealed; this is a film that I, and probably a lot of other people, would be seeing on opening weekend. So given those huge expectations, I was caught off guard when I was actually sitting in the theater watching this one and I started to get bored. This wasn’t the laugh a minute romp that I was expecting at all. It wasn’t really bad, per se, but certainly it didn’t have the sense of manic energy and momentum that The Hangover blew everyone away with. If there were no expectations going into Due Date, people would have walked out of it just feeling like it was a middle of the road comedy. Coming on the heels of the highest grossing comedy of all time, a movie that I still hear people quoting in public on a daily basis, I can see how a lot of people would have been annoyed.
The story is one that has been mined for comedy countless times before. A straight-laced professional type with a short fuse is saddled with the company of an accident-prone eccentric and we watch them chafe against one another as they’re forced to perform some sort of task. The particulars of this one have Downey’s character Peter on his way from Atlanta to LA to see the birth of his first child, which is all going swimmingly until he runs into Galifianakis’ Ethan while on the plane. Hijinx ensue and both end up kicked off of the plane, put on a no fly list, and Downey loses all of his money and identification. Without any way to prove who he is, he must rely on Ethan’s charity to get the two of them a rental car so that they can drive across country, get to LA, and see Peter’s baby be delivered, all in the nick of time; as long as nothing goes terribly wrong. And since Ethan is an absolute train wreck of a human being, things will go wrong over and over. We will laugh at how oblivious and obnoxious Ethan is, and we will laugh at Peter’s increasing frustration with the roadblocks that are set in his path. In the end, despite all of their differences and back and forth, just when it seems like things have reached a critical mass-boiling point between them, the two will learn to be great friends. And their lives will be changed forever. Roughly.
This sort of setup has probably been gone back to so many times in film history because it’s simple and it works. But, for this one, there were a few issues that got in the way of a tried and true formula coming off without a hitch. The biggest issue that I had with the film was its pacing. The opening twenty minutes or so, where we are introduced to the characters and explained to how they end up traveling together, was strangely devoid of gags. Too much time was taken working through the contrivances of how these two ended up being thrust together, and the explanation that was given ended up being so not air tight and reasonable that the time spent piecing the puzzle together wasn’t appreciated so much as it was annoying. It was over analyzed why these two guys were going to go on a trip together, but I was never sold on why I would want to watch them go on a trip together. In addition to that rocky start, these road movies often fall into the same trap for me as appearing more as a series of vignettes than one coherent narrative. We know where they need to be, but we never know the path they have to take to get there. Until we near the end of the journey there is no sense of anticipation about what is going to come next. We just watch two people as they have a series of random encounters. If we can’t anticipate what comes next, there is no tension as our duo approach it, and we have no emotional draw keeping us invested in the forward momentum of the film. What this needed was some sort of outside conflict. Maybe some sort of antagonist that is trying to stop their progress is pursuing them. Maybe if they drop below a certain speed their rental car will explode. Anything that kept this from being non-interconnected scenes of two character archetypes running across a series of guest stars would have been an improvement. This sort of thing could work in a film that had some depth. If this were a character study where the point was exploring and understanding our protagonists then it would have been much less of a problem. But in a straight comedy where we never really look past the surface level of anything it’s just unacceptable. If I am supposed to stay engaged by a comedy that has no real tension or conflict driving the story forward other than a vague idea that we have to reach a destination eventually, then it is going to have to be jammed packed with jokes.
And here the jokes aren’t at all non-stop. As a matter of fact, I would go as far as to call them too few and too far between. The Hangover was a constant barrage of gags due to the sheer number of strong personalities that you had on screen bouncing off one another. Here you have Galifianakis and Downey and that’s about it. And actually, Downey is playing such a stereotypical, stressed out, put upon straight man that he can’t really be counted on much for injecting the film with personality himself. So essentially the entire comedic weight of this film is put on Zach’s shoulders. And don’t get me wrong, he is funny. All of the laughs I got out of this one came from one of his ridiculous asides or his choice of incorporating some ludicrous mannerism. But it is too herculean a task for one character to be expected to provide all the humor for a film that has little to offer other than being a straight comedy. At times it felt like he was trying so hard to riff and improvise that his character was becoming a scattershot mess. And one masturbation gag in particular needs special mention as being a real swing and a miss. There is a scene where Peter and Ethan are forced to spend the night sleeping in their car, and, awkwardly, Ethan can’t get to sleep unless he masturbates first. His dog seems to be so used to this ritual that he has taken up mimicking him with his own little paw and doggy genitalia. Peter reacts to this ridiculous situation he is put in with mild exasperation. This is one of the only big gags that the film had up its sleeve that wasn’t given away in the advertising and it didn’t get any laughs in my theater. And strangely it didn’t even seem to be going for laughs. Not even those sort of nervous, “this is so awkward I can’t believe I’m watching this” laughs. The timing and delivery of the scene was just way off. There was nothing wacky or askew about the way Ethan masturbated, or anything funny about Downey’s shrugging, annoyed reaction to it; it was just inappropriate. This needed some sort of over the top perversion to make it a gag, or some sort of huge reaction to it by Downey to mirror our horror at seeing it. What was this scene supposed to accomplish? Was it added last minute solely because they found out the dog would fondle itself on cue? What a creepy misstep.
Going back a second to the idea that Galifianakis was overextended with the amount of improvisation that he had to do could offer up an explanation to why this didn’t work well as a drama either. He is trying so hard to get some laughs into this project that his character ends up coming off as just too ill defined. Never do I get a real sense of who he is or what made him the way that he is. Ethan doesn’t feel like a real character so much as he does one of those alternate take gag reels that usually plays over the credits of these sorts of films. Consequently we never get a chance to really feel for him or understand why Peter continues to put up with his nonsense. If Ethan was given more of a back story, or was developed in any identifiable way over the course of the film, then maybe this could have had some dramatic heft to it and it wouldn’t have needed to be so consistently hilarious in order to entertain. They try, at least in a couple of places, but you can tell that the script’s heart just isn’t in it. Ethan carries around the ashes of his dead dad and there are a couple of scenes where he gets emotional over it; but they never feel like an organic development for his character. They feel out of place, inserted between scenes of over the top stupidity as a last ditch attempt at getting us to care. Ethan goes from being completely insane to emotional over buried pains and insecurities, at the drop of a hat, like twice. Emotional stuff can’t just come out of nowhere like that; it needs to be hinted at, built to. Especially when it is surrounded by scenes of ridiculous, over the top car crash stuff where the characters go through Wile E Coyote type punishment and come out relatively unscathed. These two characters are Tom and Jerry hitting each other with hammers for 98% of the movie, after all of that they’re not going to be able to make me cry for that other 2%. I’m not going to buy it.
