Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
11/10/10
It is one of the great mysteries
of the movie business: why is it that the more writers who work on
a screenplay, the less well-written the end result generally proves to
be? Perhaps, in the end, it's not such a mystery: legions or
writers don't hire themselves to take cracks at films, executives do.
And if one writer after another is being sent into the trenches, it's probably
not just a sign that the original script has issues. It's also a
sign of significant meddling, often by people who're white-knuckle terrified
of the movie turning out to be anything other than exactly like whatever
made money last weekend. But even by the standards of the multi-writer
blockbuster, Due Date, Todd Phillips' follow-up to his uber-hit
comedy The Hangover, is oddly tone deaf to the fundamentals of storytelling.
Luckily, it compensates with a good many laughs and a truly sensational
comic performance by the movie star of the moment, Robert Downey Jr.
Due Date is a mess on pretty much every narrative level, but I can't
say I didn't have a good time, or that I won't be thinking of Downey's
very, very stressed Peter Highman pretty much any time I have to be patient
with a stone cold imbecile. But because it contains the one off-the-charts
element, it's hard to think of the movie as anything other than a missed
opportunity as a whole, one four writers were either powerless to prevent,
or managed to cause. I wasn't there to know for sure.
Peter Highman (Robert Downey
Jr.) is in Atlanta on business as his wife Sarah (Michelle Monaghan) prepares
for a C-section in LA. It'll be no problem at all for the stressed
architect to catch a flight home in time to witness the birth of his child,
that is until he runs into aspiring actor Ethan Tremblay (Zack Galifianakis)
on the plane. They end up in a conversation where the words “terrorist”
and “bomb” get dropped one too many times and, a couple of rubber bullets
later, they're both on the “Do Not Fly” list. Peter's also short
a wallet and has no ID or money, so he's stuck taking Ethan up on his offer
of a cross-country drive. To call him a man-child is an insult to
children: Ethan doesn't plan ahead except to look for more marijuana
to treat his “glaucoma”, has a way of falling asleep while driving, and
is generally the most annoying man on the planet. But he's also devastated
by the loss of his father, whose ashes he carries in a coffee can on his
pilgrimage to Hollywood, and Peter keeps getting roped into sticking with
him, even when a friend (Jamie Foxx) shows up to give him a lift.
Will Peter make it home in time to see his son be born? Will Ethan
live his dream of appearing on Two and a Half Men? And just
what is the deal with that weird dream Peter had about his child being
delivered by a wild bear?
Let's talk about Downey Jr.,
because he's the primary reason to see Due Date. In movies
like Iron Man and Sherlock
Holmes, he's perfected the art of cocky intelligence, making lovable
heroes out of men who're smarter than us and know it. Whether the
same is true of Peter, there's no way to know, but we do know this much:
listening to people prattle on is more than he can bear at this stressful
moment in his life. Maybe always: he does allude to “anger
issues” he's working on. And when a kid keeps poking him in the face
with a rubber snake and his response is to double the little tyke over
with a punch to the gut, we can tell he needs to put in a little more work.
Downey Jr. winds his character up so tight, the very sight of him trying
and failing to go to his happy place at all times is hilarious no matter
what's going on around him. And I absolutely loved the fact that
he can't let an inaccurate statement go uncorrected, making him the worst
possible traveling companion for someone like Ethan, who may not cite a
single legitimate fact during Due Date's 90 minute running time.
And when Peter gets on a roll, look out! His rants, full of threats
of bodily harm to human and canine alike, are the movie's highlights.
Some may find the film excessively
mean-spirited, but given the lack of skill with which it tries to bond
its reluctant traveling partners, I actually wish it had been a little
meaner still. Neither the writers nor Galifianakis, who's funny but
not dramatically persuasive, can pull off the trick Steve Carrell and Dinner
for Schmucks had such success with this past summer: making Ethan
a likable idiot. I pitied him, and I appreciated the warmth with
which Peter tries to relate to him at the darkest moments of his grief
over his father's death, but at the end of the day, this guy is still just
a sad, needy clown. The movie obviously seeks to take a page from
Planes, Trains and Automobiles, but can't pull off either the lack
of malice that made John Candy's Del Griffith so hard to dislike or the
vivid picture he painted of a departed wife it feels like we would have
loved. Ethan loved his father, but while “You would have loved him,
he was just like me,” makes a great punchline, it doesn't do much to make
us miss this guy we never met. And because I never felt connected
to Ethan in any way, because even Peter seems stuck with him rather than
embracing him in the end, the way the movie handles events when it finally
gets back to LA falls horribly flat.
In general, the script by
Alan R. Cohen & Alan Freedland (who share story credit) and Adam Sztykiel
& Todd Phillips is too episodic without knowing how to keep the best
jokes running. And I'm sure Peter would be quick to correct the movie's
assumption that you can just show up at a hospital in a stolen Mexican
police vehicle with a gunshot wound and not get the law involved.
But there are a lot of great one-liners, and the movie does know how to
pull out old standbys like funny car crashes and a mix-up between those
ashes and real coffee grinds whenever things start dragging too much.
And there's a really grand, albeit brief appearance by Juliette Lewis (a
very funny woman who should do more comedies) as a pot dealer that includes
an utterly classic reaction shot when Ethan shows her his acting chops
with a scene from The Godfather.
So, to recap, Due Date
is a stone cold mess that could stand near total reconstruction of a plot
some would argue should write itself given how many times Hollywood's been
down this mismatched road trip path before. But when you get one
of our best actors creating a truly memorable character and a comedy that
achieves its primary goal of delivering real laughs, I guess all those
writers earned at least some of their money. |
