'Due Date' is no 'Hangover,' no matter how hard it tries

Just about nothing that happens in the new comedy Due Date makes sense, starting with the opening setup: Two strangers, bickering in the first-class cabin of a flight about to depart from Atlanta, use the words "bomb" and terrorist" and are kicked off the plane and immediately placed on a "no fly" list. The authorities then strand Peter Highman (Robert Downey Jr.) without his wallet or identification, and Peter doesn't think to call his wife (Michelle Monaghan) or maybe his lawyer. Instead he hops into a rental car with the complete stranger he had been fighting with on the plane, a free-spirited would-be actor named Ethan Tremblay (Zach Galifianakis), and off they go to Los Angeles.

What follows is an almost exact replay of Planes, Trains and Automobiles, with a fussbudget pitted against a flake, as they race against a deadline arbitrarily imposed by the screenwriters. (In this case, Peter's wife is scheduled to deliver a baby by cesarean section, and Peter needs to be back in L.A. within three days.)

Planes, Trains and Automobiles walked a careful line -- Steve Martin and John Candy were unbearable to each other, but never to the audience. In Due Date, though, it's hard to say whom you want to see go hurtling off a cliff first: Peter is relentlessly selfish and cruel, at one point stealing the rental car and abandoning Ethan at a rest stop in Louisiana. Ethan's behavior, meanwhile, wavers from the merely grating to the borderline sociopathic. At one point, he even masturbates next to Peter as the two of them attempt to fall asleep -- a habit mimicked by his trusty sidekick, a dog named Sonny. Yes, folks, it's that kind of movie, one with a masturbating dog.

Due Date is directed by Todd Phillips, who previously made The Hangover. That movie also stretched the limits of plausibility, but it at least unfolded according to its own cracked internal logic; in the haze of the morning after, you begin to think that just about anything might have happened the night before. This new movie, however, just piles one random incident on top of another. (The screenplay is credited to Phillips, Alan R. Cohen, Alan Freedland and Adam Sztykiel -- it took four people to come up with something this strenuously unfunny.)

At one point, the two men can't obtain wired cash from Western Union, because the name on Ethan's driver's license doesn't match his "stage name" -- which leads directly to a brutal fight with a wheelchair-bound veteran (Danny McBride). Later, they take a series of wrong turns and find themselves at the United States border crossing to Mexico. Staring at the giant sign that says "Mexico," Ethan explains, "I thought it said, 'Texaco.'" Huh? Comedy is usually created from the disjunction between what you expect might happen and what ends up happening instead. But Due Date just gives us stuff that would never happen in 8 million years on any planet.

Given how confusingly conceived their characters are, Downey Jr. and Galifianakis should perhaps both be credited for not allowing this movie to become as excruciating as it might have. But both performances leave a sour aftertaste. Downey is a natural on-screen charmer, but he does nothing to lighten Peter's uncommonly dark personality.

And after seeing Galifianakis serve up such a graceful re-imagining of his man-child persona in the recent It's Kind of a Funny Story, it's a bummer to see him playing an even less believable version of his Hangover character. (Juliette Lewis, as a Birmingham pot dealer, and Jamie Foxx, as Ethan's football-player best friend, also turn up briefly, though neither is given much to do, and you quickly forget any connection they have to the plot.)

As for Phillips, I get that he's trying to fashion himself as a politically incorrect, equal-opportunity offender, someone who pokes fun at the physically disabled, Jews, blacks and many others. But as in The Hangover, some of the "comedy" employed -- the Mexican cops who arrest the Americans solely to steal their marijuana, the casual use of anti-gay slurs -- reeks of pandering and desperation and the worst sort of laziness. Why bother coming up with new jokes when we can trot out the same tired, mean-spirited old ones for another go-round?