Due Date
(R16) 110 minutes
If you cast Robert Downey jnr and Zach Galifianakis in a movie, you'd expect the smooth-talking Downey to come away with the plaudits.
But that's not the case in Due Date , with the believable idiot Galifianakis winning the day.
Downey plays the straight man - Peter Highman
- a high-powered architect caught up in Ethan Tremblay's (Galifianakis) mess of a life. Peter is everything that Ethan is not - successful, driven, focused and married.
Peter's only mistake is bumping into the loveable rogue Ethan while trying to catch a flight home to be by his wife's bedside for the birth of their first child.
From the moment he meets Ethan, things go from bad to worse, to even worse.
When Ethan ensures Peter is banned from catching any plane and he loses his wallet, Peter is forced to accept his new friend's generosity and accompany him in a rental car on a journey from Atlanta to Los Angeles.
It is against his better judgment, but he has no other option.
Much like the disastrous exploits of the 1987 film, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, featuring John Candy and Steve Martin, Peter needs plenty of patience and good luck just to survive the journey.
Thoughts of making it to his wife's bedside must take second place for now.
Though Ethan is a bumbling sack of uselessness, he doesn't have a malicious bone in his body and the dramas he gets Peter into are entirely innocent. Ultimately, Peter finds a good man in Ethan.
Due Date, directed by the same man who brought us The Hangover, doesn't quite live up to its predecessor, but the performance of Galifianakis is well worth going along for.
