DUE DATE

CONTAINS DUE WARNING OF SPOILERS (BUT IF YOU'VE SEEN THE TRAILER YOU'VE PRACTICALLY SEEN THE FILM)

In fact, you don't even have to have seen the trailer. You know Planes, Trains And Autombiles? It's the same film. A road movie in which two radically different personalities - an uptight, irascible professional and an annoying slob with grotesque personal habits and a grating personality - have to travel across America together, shouting, arguing, getting on each others' nerves but Coming Together In Understanding And Harmony. And the thing is, I didn't like Planes, Trains And Automobiles very much.

Due Date also adds stoner and weed humour to the script, which is also something I don't care for, and it's from the director and one of the stars of The Hangover, which I also didn't like. Given all that, givem all those negatives, how could it possibly be any good? Yet I did honestly go in with an open mind. Architect Robert Downey Jr needs to get to Los Angeles for the birth of his child, but through a ludicrous series of circumstances and misunderstandings he's put on the no-fly list and thus is forced to travel across the country with aspiring actor and marijuana obsessive Zach Galifianakis.

They take detours, they crash the car, Zach G smokes pot and openly masturbates, they get involved in chases, they get beaten up by a man in a wheelchair, Downey spits at a dog and punches a small child. Frankly Downey is the only remotely decent or halfway amusing thing in the whole of Due Date - none of it's funny and Zach G is just cosmically, though not comically, irritating. Alternatively, maybe it is just me as everyone else in the cinema seemed to be cackling themselves into an early grave (despite every single one of the "jokes" being in the trailer). Only occasionally, and very moderately, amusing.

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