Script Review: DUE DATE

Synopsis: A highly-strung business executive and expectant dad races across the country to try and make it home to LA for the birth of his first child- but it's all made so much more difficult by the addition of his colourful car-mate, a stoner wannabe Survivor contestant who is his natural antithesis. Buzz: With the comedy pedigree behind The Hangover, how can it fail?! Written by:Alan R. Cohen& Alan Freedland (King of the Hill) Starring:Robert Downey Jr, Zach Galifianakis, Jamie Foxx, Michelle Monaghan, Juliette Lewis, RZA, Alan ArkinDirected by:Todd PhillipsInfo: Second draft, dated 06/03/09 €“ (110 pages) Status: Post-production. Released 5th November 2010 (US).

First, a note on the casting. The extra players all shape up to look like a good collective, from the kinky indie-ism offered by Juliettte Lewis, through the peerless Alan Arkin and the oddly titled Wu-Tanger RZA (grow up and get a real name!) to the less-than-top-form-recently Jamie Foxx, but it is in top two players that Due Date really holds it draw.

With Todd Phillips helming, before taking on the mammoth task of recreating the success of The Hangover with its sequel, first appearances look promising.

Zach Galifianakis has made some excellent choices since The Hangover made him the hottest comedy property in Hollywood - how easily he could have gone the way of Danny McBride - the (falsely) heralded golden boy of comedy and made fucking Land of the Lost or something equally as bad.

Instead of being thrust into projects designed to be his star-makers (as is the unfortunate wont of the movie-makers), the beardy fella has only notably appeared in G-Force (for which he can be forgiven), in a small but excellent cameo in Up In The Air, and as an obnoxious lush prospective step-father in the fabulous Youth in Revolt, and his profile has simply grown in response. He is made for the role of Ethan, the stoner man-child who is pretty predictably both at the root of every problem his opposite number Peter encounters and also the key to his even more predictable moment of self-realisation, and I can see Due Date being very much his movie.

And that's saying something, considering the second lead player is Tony Stark himself Robert Downey Jr (swoon), but as much as Galifianakis is perfectly suited to the flakey, drug-infused man-child role, Downey Jr is extremely difficult to imagine as the straight man, loaded with cynicism and pretty much just boring. He was never meant to be the butt of any joke, and his charisma is such that it is even more difficult to suspend that opinion and accept that his character would be wracked with self-doubt, have self-worth issues and deep-seated emotional trauma that wasn't the product of his own excessive lifestyle choices.

I hate to be set against a movie before the opening credits have rolled, and I tried to ignore the nagging feeling that Downey Jr is the square peg to the character of Peter's round hole, but there is a level of collective consciousness that comes with an actor impressing himself onto an movie-going audience over time that cannot be ignored for roles that simply dont fit.

Anyway, nothing like leading readers before giving the facts eh?

So to the business of the script itself. I love the opening, with shots of an unappeasable Peter interviewing nanny candidates who will obviously never live up to his unrealistic high standards: the sequence is a good foundation for Peter's character, and the relationship dynamic between himself and his more easy-going wife Christine, and the pay off is the first of many jokes that hit the target. Throughout the short sequence there are a number of mini-jokes, surrounding Peter's preposterous disliking of the candidates:

They interview a JAMAICAN NANNY. She hands them a resume.

JAMAICAN NANNY I have references from families in the U.S. and Jamaica as well. PETER Uh huh. That's great. And I assume you won't mind submitting to random urine tests? CHRISTINE Peter! PETER What? Drug use is part of her culture.

In the grand scheme of things, it's the jokes (mostly Ethan's) that are the highlight of the movie, but it is extremely ill-judged to put some much into them that the fundamentals of the rest of the movie come up short. You see, the major problem with Due Date is that it's like a conglomerate of every stereotypical plot device from every comedy road trip movie of the past ten years or so, without having a strong story-line to justify the unoriginality.

In amongst the various developments are a number of familiar-feeling narrative ideas: first, Peter and Ethan are thrown off the flight that would have got them back to LA at their originally scheduled time- in time for Peter to be at his wife's C-Section birth of their first child- due to their careless talking about bombs and are met with the new breed of comedy characters- the Disgruntled Airline Security Staff who are an inevitable cultural bi-product of our post-911 world.

Next they are forced to travel cross-country despite hating one another (how very Planes, Trains & Automobiles of them), only to lose their means of transport and have to find another, this time in the shape of an ultra-modern geriatric lesbian couple and their teenage daughter. On the way they stop off twice, both with pretty funny consequences, particularly when while staying with Peter's cousins-in-law Ethan rubs one out over a picture from their wedding album, and "defaces" it, before accidentally framing Peter (who already wasnt their favourite person) for the salty accident.

Again it is the jokes, both wit-based and physical that are the highlights, and the most genuine laughs come when the script leads you to believe that it is toeing a well-trodden stereotyped narrative tract or is leading up to something very obvious, such as the scene in which it seems very likely that Ethan is having sex with the teenage daughter of his and Peter's road-side rescuers, but it turns out somewhat cleverly to in fact be one of the aged lesbians on the end of his noodle. But even as it slips away from the rougher patches and the plot development issues, Due Date seems to always be dragged back to its fundamental problems.

While Due Date the movie will undoubtedly be all about Galifianakis' Ethan, Due Date the script is centred entirely on Peter- his is the only character who is fleshed out and has an actual history that matters to the narrative- predominantly his lack of relationship with his estranged father- while everyone else's detail, including side-car companion Ethan's, is entirely incidental. And while the tag-line might read "a road-trip across America to get home in time for a birth", Due Date has a more philosophical journey at its centre- Peter's voyage of self-discovery, and the casting off of his snooty business-man cocoon. Sound familiar? Sadly,even this attempt to add substance to this set of road-trip paradigms is a tired cliche.

The majority of the plot-developing action happens in the final third of the script (the last thirty or so pages) following the revelation that Peter's unborn child may in fact be the result of an adulterous affair between his friend, and Christine's ex Jim (presumably the RZA role) and Peter's wife herself. Had that revelation been slightly earlier in the script, perhaps at the expense of the crashed Frat-house party which is as full of filmic cliches as is presumably possible (the only surprise is that peter doesn't end up arrested because of the transgressions of the dope-head Ethan), the plot may have been a more tangible thing. As it is, the next development- Peter's reunion with his long-absent father thanks to Ethan's sneakery- seems shoe-horned in at the end of the third act, without enough focus, and their reconciliation after so long appears ridiculously, even callously simple. I fear the Alan Arkin appearance will be all too fleeting.

So, despite everything, why did I still like it? Even I am struggling to find a reason. Galifianakis will be excellent, that much is for certain, and there is definitely enough intrigue in how Downey Jr will deal with his character and its difficulties to justify the entrance fee, and perhaps I'm being over-critical of a script for a film that doesnt aim to be anything other than a comedic no frills road-trip because of the expectation attached to its principal leads.