Due Date – The Hangover’s Leftovers
The unpredicted success of The Hangover could only mean one thing: clones. Unfortunately, the law of diminishing returns suggests that upcoming clones, including The Hangover 2 (due out next year), won’t be as funny. And The Hangover wasn’t even that good in the first place. Arriving into our cinema screens this week is the first clone, Due Date. Directed by The Hangover’s Todd Phillips, it really does feel like an exhausted comedy.
The story is a typical road journey. An odd couple - the uptight Peter Highman (Robert Downey Jr) trying to get home for the birth of his first child, and the downright bizarre effeminate wannabe actor Ethan Tremblay (Zach Galifianakis) - are placed together in an awkward situation after losing their flight to LA, and end up having to share a rental car across an entire continent, driving each other mad in the process.
We’ve seen this kind of story before, most notably in John Hughes’s likeable Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, in which Steve Martin is infuriated by the well-meaning but idiotic John Candy. But what differentiates Hughes’s film from Due Date is how relatable the characters are. Martin is uptight but relatively normal: we could all react in the way he does. Candy is a dimwit but never dangerously so. In Due Date we get a very different situation. Galifianakis, pretty much reprising his role as Alan in The Hangover, ranges for delusional to childish to mentally-disabled. In fact, like Alan, he’s more of a collection of quirks from society’s extremes as opposed to a full-bodied character. But the real problem lies in Peter. Downey relies far too much on his trademark smarm, and rather than represent the straight part of who we all are, we instead get possibly the most unlikable character of the year. In one scene he punches a child in the stomach. In another he spits in a dog’s face. He’s made so obnoxious that we ultimately couldn’t care less if he manages to witness his child’s birth or not. And neither scene is particularly funny in light of Peter’s nasty streak.
The nature of road journeys is to give us a slice of the diversity of life, both in its benignity and malevolence. But we get very little from either in this film. Juliette Lewis as a drug dealer and Jamie Foxx as Peter’s friend fail to have an impact, and moments of comic potential (a debate over a perm, Peter suspecting Foxx seduced his wife) are completely ignored. It’s only Danny MacBride as a bitter war vet who works in a Western Union office that manages to get any laughs.
Director Todd Phillips is disappointing in his direction. Playing for extremes, he forgets to add an emotional core to the film, instead relying on the notion of birth to warm the audience. At times he attempts to give emotional depth through music. But the passion in songs from the likes of Neil Young, Fleet Foxes, and the Cowboy Junkies only clashes with the ridiculous nature of the characters. Instead of ramping up the slapstick and forcing the audience to suspect our disbelief (think Dumb and Dumber), we get a toned-down movie world that just doesn’t suit the characters. The only music scene that works is Ethan’s pot-smoking session while he listens to Pink Floyd (and even that is a movie cliché).
The cheap jokes, the anemic plot, the wasted comic opportunities, and the poor characterisation of Due Date all seem to lead to one thing: a rushed project. Despite being written by the team involved in the perceptive and amusing King of the Hill, it ultimately feels more like a spin-off from The Hangover. It should have been called The Leftover.
2.5 / 5 stars
