A Journey to Remember

They say in Hollywood actors should avoid one if not all of the following...uh...options: working with kids, animals, and/or anyone who could upstage them.

In Todd (The Hangover) Phillips’ latest, Due Date, Robert Downey Jr. gamely interacts with a couple of aggroying children, puts up with quite the randy pooch, and is partnered with Zach Galifianakis, a scene-stealer if we ever saw one, alright.

And boy, does he get to do things to each...things that are so wish-fulfilling it’ll make you go oh no they did!

Downey plays Peter Highman, a high-strung architect and an expectant first-time father on his way from Atlanta to L.A. for his wife’s schedule C-section later in the week.

The guy has some a--hole-esque qualities in him: he’s very driven, neurotic, and tightly wound, but he means well in his own way.

As he hurries to catch a flight home one morning, his travel plans start to go awry even before he’s met the thorn that will be at his side for days – he’s dreamt that som’in’ was coming, y’ see.

And then he meets him...Ethan Tremblay (Galifianakis), a Kabbalah-Red String-wearing, French bulldog-toting aspiring actor on his way to “Hollywood,” and pretty much the ying to Peter’s reluctant yang.

Where the latter is uptight to a fault, the former is loose and then some (must be all that medical marijuana), not to mention kinda...clueless, I guess, or, better, socially inept, but, y’ know, a total individual at the same time who also means well in his own way.

Long story short, the two are on the same flight, but, as it would happen, Peter gets bounced from the plane thanks to Ethan and is forced – forced, I tell ya but won’t spill for ya as to how – to road-trip it in a hurry to California if he wants to be there for the birth of his first son.

What follows is an often hilarious journey during which the unlikely pair will learn a little bit about each other, that is when they’re not detouring to get some more “glaucoma medication” for Ethan (meeting pharmacist Juliette Lewis and her piece-o’-work kids along the way), or driving off the side of a bridge, or getting into trouble at the Mexican border, just to mention but a few of the shenanigans they get into together.

The problem with Due Date – and it’s a minor problem if you take the movie for what it is: a pretty absurd, heightened slice of life – is it’s all surface.

We don’t get to meet these guys, really, see who they are, what makes them act the way they do aside from each other (some father issues are a bit too telegraphed for my taste and, ultimately, didn’t really shine a light on their inner lives).

In that context, in the context of the movie, it works, and it elicits great laughs. I almost chocked on my Diet Coke quite a few times. Which is fun, obviously.

Once you add the lack of balance between the tone of the movie and its humor, though, Due Date and Downey and Galifianakis’ tremendous chemistry – which is rumored to have taken a hit in recent days because of Mel Gibson, btw – gets bogged down a bit and the whole thing kinda seems pointless, in a way, because you know these two ifs on the road aren’t destined to become BFF...or a timeless cinematic pairing.

Theirs was to get to there, to entertain the audience for a couple of hours, and that’s what they do – nothing more, nothing less.

My Rating ***

Photo: Warner Bros.