FILM REVIEW Due Date

A remake that wasn’t overdue


Cinema
Daniel Carey

TWENTY-THREE years on, one particular scene from the John Hughes comedy ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles’ remains especially fresh in the mind. It takes place in a hotel room, where Neal (Steve Martin) and Del (John Candy) wake up after being forced to spend the night together in a double bed. Still half asleep and perhaps believing they are at home, they end up holding hands. “Del, why did you kiss my ear?” asks Neal. “Why are you holding my hand?” Del counters. “Where’s your other hand?” Neal shoots back. “Between two pillows,” Del counters. “Those aren’t pillows!” screams a horrified Neal as the two abruptly disentangle themselves from one another.
Todd Phillips’s unofficial remake of that movie, entitled ‘Due Date’, produces some laugh-out-loud moments. But the basic likeability of the main characters in ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles’ is missing here.
Still, there are reasons to be cheerful. The movie is well cast, and the two leads (Robert Downey Jr as uptight architect Peter, and Zach Galifianakis as aspiring actor Ethan) play well off one another during a road trip.



After clashing on a plane in Atlanta, Georgia, both find themselves on the ‘no-fly’ list, and with his wallet gone, Peter has little option but to accept Ethan’s offer of a lift to Los Angeles. One is heading west for the birth of his first child; the other is carrying the remains of his recently-deceased father in a coffee can and plans to break Hollywood.
Ethan talks non-stop and says whatever’s on his mind. “At what age did you lose your virginity?” he asks Peter shortly after they have left the airport car-park. “I was nine years old,” he continues, not waiting for an answer. “Great gal ... Sheila Pimples.”
Support comes in the form of Michelle Monaghan (as Peter’s heavily pregnant wife Sarah), Juliette Lewis (as Ethan’s drug dealer) and Jamie Foxx (a friend of Peter’s who’s a little too friendly with Sarah for Ethan’s liking). En route, Peter insults a wheelchair-bound war veteran and finds himself getting assaulted, while Ethan responds to a heartfelt story of childhood angst by bursting out laughing. Neither character is sympathetic. Peter has a major anger-management problem, while Ethan is sometimes downright sinister.
More than once, the movie opts for the obvious cheap gag at the expense of something more interesting. Getting high and falling alseep while driving just didn’t cut it for this viewer, while a leitmotif involving the Charlie Sheen sitcom ‘Two And A Half Men’ added nothing. Ethan’s Marlon Brando impression seemed self-indulgent at a stage when the picture needed to get the audience on its side.
However, although the big laughs are infrequent, there are some decent sequences, such as an accidental border crossing precipitated by Ethan’s inability to distinguish Mexico from Texaco. There’s an occasional great line too, though a lot of the best parts of the script will already be familiar to anyone who has seen the trailer.
Ethan’s belief that the Grand Canyon is man-made and the Hoover Dam was built by the Pilgrims is challenged by a weary Peter. At another stage, Peter asks sarcastically if Ethan has ever heard of William Shakespeare. “Yes, I’ve heard of him – he’s a famous pirate!” Ethan snaps back. “And by the way, it’s Shakesbeard!”
Overall, ‘Due Date’ feels like a missed opportunity. When Steve Martin sneered abuse at the woman from the car-rental agency, we felt his pain. Here, there’s a few too many leaps of faith involved in what’s meant to be a buddy movie.

Rating 5 out of 10