Peter Highman (Robert Downey, Jr.) needs to get home. His wife Sarah (Michelle Monaghan) is about to have the couple’s first child, and he’s promised her he’ll make it back to Los Angeles by Friday so he can be in the delivery.

Robert Downey, Jr. and Zach Galifianakis in Due Date © Warner Bros.

Shouldn’t be a problem, save for the fact aspiring actor Ethan Tremblay (Zach Galifianakis) has managed to get him kicked off his flight and put on the government’s No-Fly list thanks to a set of circumstances too unbelievable to recount. Now he’s driving cross-country with this irascible, if kind-hearted, disaster magnet, doing his best not to go completely insane as calamity after calamity begins to befall the both of them.

Director Todd Phillips’ Due Date, his follow-up to his successful summertime smash The Hangover, is nothing more than a thinly veiled remake of John Hughes’ 1987 classic Planes, Trains and Automobiles with Downey taking over for Steve Martin and Galifianakis filling the shoes of the late John Candy. Things do not get any simpler than that, and while the Thanksgiving holiday has been replaced with the birth of a child the actual road trip dynamics haven’t changed a single solitary bit. Two mismatched people thrown together by circumstance will learn to put aside their differences and develop a close-knit friendship that will improve the both of them by the time they reach their destination, wrong put right with civility and companionship saving the day.

Problem is, Due Date isn’t very funny. Save one glorious sequence featuring a game Juliette Lewis and a pair of children Downey will quickly dominate in brutal deadpan fashion, all of the bits I chuckled at were all in this film’s trailer. I did not laugh out loud. I seldom smiled. Overall I was bored, disinterested and more or less annoyed, the majority of the film going nowhere interesting and offering up very few reasons to care.

The screenplay, credited to Phillips and three others, is as flat as a pancake. It’s going through the motion, echoing Hughes’ picture as well as a half dozen others including The Blues Brothers and the director’s own Road Trip. Very little stands out, and other than random moments there’s just not that much to talk about.

Not that it’s a total loss. I appreciate the fact the Phillips and company have chosen to make Peter such a dark and almost entirely detestable human being. While what happens to get him thrown off his plane isn’t his fault, his attitude and bearing right from the start is ungodly. This isn’t a good guy and Downey fearlessly dives right into the center of him playing up all of his hissable qualities. There is something admirable about putting forth such a creature as your erstwhile hero, and I got the feeling as things went on the filmmakers could have cared less if the audience chose to root for him.

I also like that Phillips tried, at least on paper, to make Due Date more of a thoughtful and introspective piece than any of his previous features. There are complexities to these characters that are somewhat of a surprise, both actors required to dig a bit deeper than you’d thought they’d have had to based on what you see in the trailers. The film is unafraid to slow things down and get a bit quiet, letting the characters and their dialogue speak for themselves without the aid of flashy visuals or an overbearing score.

Problem is, there’s nothing interesting being said, and other than a couple of introspective moments that tickled my fancy I could have cared less about either Peter or Ethan and it didn’t matter to me whether they made it to Los Angeles or not. The film is flat. Visually flat, structurally flat and dramatically flat, and even though there were things about it I admired there was almost nothing I can admit to liking.

Is it horrible? No, not really, but it isn’t any good, either. Downey and Galifianakis do their best (it’s actually the most subdued, likeable and reserved the latter has ever been, and that includes his performance in the far superior It’s Kind of a Funny Story) and I appreciate that Phillips is at least trying to shakeup his formula a bit but Due Date just didn’t cut it. There aren’t any real laughs and the chuckles are benign ones, and other than that aforementioned bit with Lewis I can’t think of anything here that stands out. This movie is a cross-country road trip that’s stranded in neutral, the final product as out of gas (or ideas) as anything I’ve seen this year. 

Film Rating: êê (out of 4) 

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