Directed by Todd Phillips
(R)
**
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Todd Phillips must be suffering “a hangover from The Hangover,” said The Hollywood Reporter. After releasing the most successful R-rated comedy of all time last year, the director seems to be trying to “snatch hilarity from the jaws of desperation” with this half-baked road comedy. The film stars Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis as mismatched strangers who, after being mistaken for terrorists at the Atlanta airport, choose to drive to Los Angeles together with the clock ticking, thanks to one man’s very pregnant wife. But Due Date is “fast, lazy, and out of control in a way that’s basically commendable,” said Karina Longworth in The Village Voice. Phillips approached it as “a battery-recharging quickie,” and its slapped-together air is one of its best traits. The other is the work of its co-stars, said Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly. Downey and Galifianakis are “so off in their chemistry as to be bizarrely on.” Though they have “nowhere interesting to go besides the happily-ever-after of dull, responsible male maturity,” this pairing works because the two characters “seem to fascinate each other.”
