It’ s a side effects of metformin hcl 500mg daunting challenge to follow up a comedy like The Hangover, but Todd Phillips does his best to take a new spin on the tried-and-true, buddy-comedy road trip genre with Due Date.
The story metformin hcl side effects is straightforward: Peter Highman (Robert Downey Jr.) is trying to get home to his pregnant wife (Michelle Monaghan) before she goes in for her scheduled C-section (thus, the title, Due Date). When Peter is kicked off his plane home for suspected terrorism, he’s swiftly put on the No Fly List, and has to rely on the bumbling, struggling actor, and fellow No Fly Lister, Ethan Tremblay (Zach Galifianakis), to get him home in time. For good, bad, or indifferent, Due Date is essentially John Hughes’ Planes, Trains and Automobiles, which is a tough film for any movie to be compared with. Regardless of the similarities, with comedies, it usually comes down to the performance of the actors and not a strong story to sell the laughs. Without a standout cast to make the insanity on screen believable, then all you have is a mediocre story and nothing to hook your audience.
You only need to reference one movie when you’re talking about Robert Downey Jr. being a phenomenal actor, and that’s Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin. The rest is just extra. Chaplin is proof the Downey can lose himself in a character and deliver a brilliant performance. Unfortunately, we have an entire generation that has grown up during the “Downey resurgence”. Everyone knows Iron Man and Tropic Thunder, which both house fantastic roles, but they don’t know him for his early work like Less Than Zero and Richard III, or his more recent gems like Good Night and Good Luck, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, and Zodiac. He’s always been an exceptional actor, and it’s wonderful to see the guy rebound theatrically, but, for me, it always comes back to Chaplin, and the Oscar that he lost to Pacino.
In Due Date, the guy’s stellar, like always. To expect to see anything but entertaining, near perfected work from Downey at this point would be foolish, and his take on the “the Steve Martin character” from Planes, Trains and Automobiles is impressive. Every word out of Downey is suave and enticing, even when he’s being a complete ass to Galifiankis’ Tremblay. You can feel the resentment of his character’s life through his performance, and the same can’t be said for many actors given similar roles. Martin’s portrayal of the uptight straight-man in Planes is hard to relate to until he finally gives in to John Candy’s bizarre personality quirks, while Downey’s rendition of that archetypal character is more wired, abrasive, but, ultimately, sympathetic. I may have to give extra credit to Downey’s natural charisma and snarky line delivery, but you can’t ignore his ability to play off of a master of awkward timing like Zach Galifianakis.
Galifianakis is about one Nascar race away from typecasting himself as the new Will Ferrell. He’s a talented actor, but so are typecast comedians like Ferrell, Jack Black, and Adam Sandler. The formula for being an exceptional film comic is not to reprise the role that made you famous. Jim Carrey never played Dumb & Dumber’s Lloyd Christmas again; he reinvented and pushed himself from one role to the next. Admittedly, to mention this you have to generalize, because, of course, Ferrell doesn’t play the exact same character in The Other Guys, Talledega Nights, Step Brothers, and Semi-Pro, but it’s the fact that they are all broken from the same Anchorman mold. I’m afraid that Galifianakis will slip into the same situation in a few years if he doesn’t try to break out.
In Due Date, he might as well be Alan from The Hangover, but less naive and obvious. What I love, though, is how tragic his character in Due Date is. I have no doubt that there’s a brilliant actor living inside of Zach Galifianakis, and the glimpses of that in Due Date are amazing. Because of how he presents himself on film, he’s instantly sympathetic, so when he starts talking about his dead father, we feel his emotional pain; it’s hard to let go and move on, and he sells that sentiment, but it’s not perfect. When John Candy admits to Steve Martin that he’s been lying about his dead wife, it’s a heartbreaking moment that transcends his character traits, and I feel like we should have gotten that from Galifianakis in Due Date. That’s something that was missing from the film; his dead father motivation never quite hits home, though, it’s more impactful if you muse on it after watching the film.
Honestly, if I hadn’t re-watched Planes, Trains and Automobiles two days before I saw Due Date, I might think that the movie isn’t as derivative as it seems. It’s the same movie with a different story, if that makes sense. The movie plays out completely differently, but the structure, the core of the movie, is the same as the Steve Martin/John Candy version. Think of any buddy-comedy, road trip movie, and odds are it’s similar to Due Date. Is that bad? Not really. Does it make Due Date a poor film? Of course not. In this instance, what derivation does is put emphasis on other films while taking away the merits of this one. The same goes for remakes. We never compare an original film to a remake; we always compare the remake to the original, unless you saw the original after the remake, of course. It’s just natural. Due Date disappoints in terms of originality and cohesiveness. It’s a movie that seems to skip to one chuckle to the next, and rarely manages to hit big laughs or flow organically. The saving grace of the movie is the cast lead by Todd Phillip’s direction. The rest is superfluous and forgettable, but the ride is very entertaining while it lasts.
Overall 7/10
Directed by Todd Phillips. Written by Alan R. Cohen & Alan Freedland and Adam Sztykiel & Todd Phillips. Cinematography by Lawrence Sher. Edited by Debra Neil-Fisher. Music by Christophe Beck.
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Zach Galifianakis, Michelle Monaghan, Jamie Foxx, Juliette Lewis, and Danny McBride.
