Sunday, November 7, 2010

Due Date (2010)


Listen, making a big-budget, studio comedy is hard. Comedy is also very subjective. Some people love Todd Phillips' comedies. I mean, The Hangover was huge. I thought it was really overrated. I liked Old School, and to a certain extent, Road Trip. And now, here's Due Date. It's especially hard to make a road trip comedy, where two different people are thrust together, people who usually hate eachother, and somehow have to learn to get along to get to their eventual destination. Due Date tries hard to shake up this formula. Both Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianiakis are pretty equally unlikeable at the start, but manage to gain that sort of likeability, somewhat, towards eachother by the end. Here's the thing: uniformly everyone in this is pretty good. Personally, I find Zach Galifiniakis is really funny, and he does a good job here being both annoying and insane, and able to find some heart, eventually for his character. Robert Downey Jr. gets to be the uber-high strung guy in the relationship, and he's good at the too. This keeps coming up, so the best way I can say this is: I think this movie is definitely a likeable one, there is a lot of good here, but its just not particularly funny. It definitely has its moments, no doubt, its not like I DIDN'T laugh, but it wasn't funniest comedy of 2010 either. I will say this though: big ups to a couple of quick, supporting cameos too: the RZA and Danny McBride, as per usual, were awesome. And I really enjoyed the resurrection of Ice Cube's "Check Yo'Self" on the soundtrack. Oh, I forgot too, for a comedy, this movie really looks good. I never notice these things usually as far as comedies go but there are a couple great looking scenes here, particular one  near the end set at the Grand Canyon.




I notice they were very careful not to play that last verse. Of course, they didn't need to, but still.

-K


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