Due Date

Last night my mother volunteered to take the kids for the night so Simone and I could go out to the movies, and then come home and sleep through the night without interruption.  I had just flown in from New York, and it was a little sad to see the kids again and then say goodbye right away, but hey, uninterrupted sleep!  We had dinner at my Mom’s circus house and then headed out to the movie theater.

There were a lot of good choices, but I had already seen the Owls of Ga’Hool and Megamind, so we settled on a grown-up movie.  We went to see Due Date.  SPOILER ALERT: I am now going to describe my general feelings about the film “Due Date” and, while I will not use a lot of specifics, if you don’t wish to know anything at all about the overall nature of the film, you should stop reading right now and go out and see Megamind, which was fantastic.

Due Date was an okay movie.  It was funny, very funny, at times, but not as spectacular as I had hoped, given how much I had enjoyed The Hangover.  There were moments when I was laughing out loud, but it sometimes veered too far into territory that I will call “Guy Gets Repeatedly Crapped On” territory.  For some reason, I do not enjoy movies where the main character meets up with some weirdo who repeatedly ruins their life for the whole movie in supposedly hilarious ways and then at the end they are all friends.  It’s funny for a few minutes, sure, but I always just end up feeling bad for the guy, and furious hatred for the weirdo.  Whenever the movie comes to it’s “Oh, now I understand why you are so weird, so I like you,” moment, I cannot forgive the weirdo.  This is why I did not enjoy films like “The Cable Guy,” “You, Me and Dupree,” and much of “Dinner for Schmucks.”

Actually, I liked “Dinner for Schmucks” okay, and I liked “Due Date” okay, and here’s why: About halfway through “Due Date” the tables turn and Robert Downey Jr. starts doing mean things to Zach Galifianakis as well.  I have no problem with a movie where two people are being mean to each other and then make up at the end, because hey, sometimes people are mean to each other and then make up.  As long as both of them have done something horrible, my senses of cinematic right and wrong are satisfied.  I can even stand for someone to do one terrible thing to someone and then try and make up for it, because that’s life, isn’t it?  But for one guy to repeatedly crap all over and destroy another guy’s life for 90 minutes and then just get forgiven at the end?  Ludicrous.

I know that maybe I should be more forgiving, but if some stranger cost me my house, my job, my girlfriend, my friends, and my family, I would not hug it out at the end.  I would punch them in the teeth.  I don’t care how goofy/stupid/adorable they are.  That scenario is not “Due Date” specific, but that’s how films of this type usually go.  For me, “Due Date” redeemed itself and became a movie that I do not hate because both characters had some issues, but it really wasn’t as hysterical as I wanted it to be.

I guess if I could go back in time, I would probably buy a bunch of copies of Action Comics #1 and seal them up perfectly, buried in a box with recent winning lottery numbers written on a note beside them.  And also on the note, I would tell myself that “Due Date” might be a rental, but still worth seeing.