Male bondage

Due Date is some kind of hellacious highway nightmare. With equal parts horror and comedy, it pits two extremely different personalities against one another on a long road trip, and the resultant behavior is marginally funny and often monstrous.

After seeing Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis go at it in this evil bastard cousin of Planes, Trains & Automobiles, I think the two actors really must’ve hated each other at some point during filming. They are just far too good at giving each other the worst of times.

Peter Highman (Downey Jr.) has a baby on the way, and he needs to get home to his wife (Michelle Monaghan) pronto. A series of mishaps courtesy of Ethan Tremblay (Galifianakis), an actor wannabe, gets him placed on the no-fly list. Peter is stranded in Atlanta with no luggage, no wallet and virtually no hope.

Along comes Ethan in a Subaru Impreza, with a French bulldog and his father’s ashes in tow. He offers a ride, Peter begrudgingly accepts, and the nightmare begins.

Todd Phillips, director of last year’s money sponge The Hangover, is at the helm, and this isn’t another guffaw-fest by any means, and if you traipse to the theater thinking you are in for a non-stop laugh riot, you are setting yourself up for major letdown. This is a pitch black, supremely uncomfortable comedy. It has many laughs, but those laughs are often accompanied by feelings of guilt for laughing at such horrible things.

Take, for instance, a scene where Peter is forced to babysit a drug dealer’s demon spawn children while Ethan scores some weed. Peter proves to be perhaps the worst babysitter in cinema history, resorting to extreme measures when words don’t do the trick.

Peter is one of the more unpleasant guys to hit screens this year. While the screenplay doesn’t outright state it, he seems to be suffering from a sort of mental-emotional condition that causes massive mood swings, violent behavior, and lethal streaks of vicious sarcasm.

Peter is, in fact, so nasty that he makes Ethan the more likeable of this odd couple. That’s quite the accomplishment considering that Ethan likes to masturbate in car sleepovers with Peter mere feet away, and he falls asleep at the wheel, nearly killing them both.

Like The Hangover, the film features some celebrity cameos. Juliette Lewis stops by as a drug dealer, while Jamie Foxx has a memorable moment as Peter’s friend and maker of really bad coffee. The best cameo comes from ever-reliable Danny McBride as a Western Union employee who wants to close shop early because he has reservations at Chili’s. His physical confrontation with Peter is one of the film’s highlights. And, as he often does, director Phillips himself shows up for a couple of minutes, this time in a bathrobe and smoking pot.

Monaghan, a very gifted actress, is given close to nothing to do as Peter’s frustrated wife, and that’s not surprising considering that this is a film about torturous male bonding. We see her talking on the phone a lot, and the obligatory birthing scene.

Viewers have the choice of accepting Due Date for what it is and enjoying two master comic actors stretching out, or bemoaning the fact that the humor isn’t good-natured, and the movie doesn’t really provide the greatest of times. I saw what looked to be half of a high school sitting together in the third and fourth row, ready for a rollicking, raucous movie. Only sporadic laughter arose from their region.

In the end, the movie is not as funny, nor as good, as The Hangover, but it has its own sort of demented appeal. While the film will probably enjoy some moderate success, a sequel is probably not in the offing, not unless it involves Peter and Ethan going on a killing spree and eating some live baby ducklings. Those are about the only lousy things they have left to do to others and themselves after this amusing, if slightly off-putting, chapter.