Due Date (2010) 
 
 Early in “Due Date” the odd-couple main characters, Peter and Ethan, visit a pot dealer. As Ethan ( Zach Galifianakis ) checks out the bud, his reluctant companion, Peter ( Robert Downey Jr. ), waits in the living room with the dealer’s two children. Peter has been kicked off a plane and forced into a car with Ethan, and he isn’t happy. He swats away the children’s questions and mocks the girl, and her brother, who looks about 9, bounces a toy off Peter’s head in seeming retaliation. One thing leads to another, and Peter punches the boy in the stomach so hard that the child doubles over, which certainly gives the expression “belly laugh” new meaning. 
 
 Of course the boy (Jakob Ulrich) is acting, and it’s all meant to be in good, nasty fun. The director Todd Phillips, who scored big last year with “The Hangover,” isn’t saying in “Due Date” that it’s O.K. for an adult to strike a child. Mr. Phillips likes to push studio comedies to the edge of mainstream acceptability, retrofitting old ideas (here, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles”) with new-school aggression and obscuring his social conservatism under the fig leaf of calculating comedy. But he’s too canny to make a movie in which an adult hurts any ol’ child. Rather, in “Due Date,” he tells us it is perfectly acceptable to laugh as a (much admired) movie star pretends to whale on a pesky child who ostensibly had it coming. 
 
 The (faked) child abuse theme is something of a continuation of the baby-in-jeopardy stunt that Mr. Phillips pulled off, if barely, in “The Hangover,” a funnier, more intricately plotted and ambitious movie. In that comedy three amigos (including one played by Mr. Galifianakis) wake up in a wrecked Vegas suite after a collective blackout during a bachelor party and find themselves the surprised custodians of a baby. Strapped to Mr. Galifianakis’s chest like a ticking bomb, the baby is the story’s savviest touch. It’s an easy prop, good for audience sighs and gasps, but it also works like an amulet because its very presence protects the men, signifying that all vulgar and violent evidence to the contrary, they are father material. 
 
 The sucker-punched boy in “Due Date,” by contrast, is the son of a hippie-ish space case (Juliette Lewis), whose profession, low-rent digs and seemingly altered state both set the scene and effectively justify Peter’s brutality. If the dealer had taken care of her child, if she didn’t sell drugs, cleaned her house and controlled her children, her son wouldn’t have been harmed. Maternal neglect sets up the joke, and a wallop from a daddy-disciplinarian, who’s every bit as ill behaved and finally uncontrolled as the child he hurts, brings the funny home. It’s an unfair fight, but that’s also part of the joke. As is the self-interest — a signature element in Mr. Phillips’s derivative, generic work — that drives Peter’s fist into that tiny belly. 
 
 In the logic of Mr. Phillips’s universe, punching a child is one more ha-ha, outrageous, liberating act that men (at least on screen) experience in the wilds before returning to the little ladies tapping their feet back home. In “Due Date” the missus (Michelle Monaghan, purely decorative), who’s married to Peter and pregnant (I didn’t notice if she was barefoot), is understandably eager for him to return for the Caesarean delivery of their first child. Like “The Hangover,” “Due Date” creates two oppositional spaces for the sexes — the giant playground in which men run riotously amok, and the domestic sphere of waiting women — you know, kind of like “The Odyssey,” but with masturbation jokes and vomit. ||||| by: Peter Travers 
 
 Recipe for nutso fun: Mix Zach Galifianakis with Robert Downey Jr. Apply the same mold John Hughes used for Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Have Todd Phillips stir with wack-ass abandon. Don't worry about missing ingredients, like plot. Serve to an audience ready to lap it up. 
 
 
 
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 There you have Due Date, a raucous ride built out of used parts and bizarre shifts in tone but driven by two comic virtuosos who know that the best laugh riffs rise from a baseline of character. Director and co-writer Phillips (Road Trip, Old School) realizes his new movie has an 800-pound monkey on its back. That would be The Hangover, the 2009 farce that came out of nowhere to sprinkle Galifianakis with stardust and rule the world. Is Due Date the new Hangover? It is not. But it has its own rewards. 
 
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 They all have to do with the interaction of the lead actors. Downey plays Peter Highman, a stressed-out suit in a hurry to leave Atlanta and get home to Los Angeles, where his wife (Michelle Monaghan) is about to give birth. Is he the father, or is it his BFF (Jamie Foxx)? Don't care. You won't either. What matters is that Peter meets Ethan Tremblay (Galifianakis), a wanna-be actor and full-fledged pain in the ass who gets them kicked off a jet and sharing a car to L.A. When they aren't out to kill each other, they grudgingly reveal their secret hearts. Sugar shock? Sometimes. But when Peter pushes Ethan into improvs to prove he can act, or the two just let their emotions bleed, Galifianakis and Downey gift Due Date with something rare in any kind of movie: a soul. ||||| Due Date 
 
 'Due Date' review: Robert Downey Jr. looks uncomfortable as Zach Galifianakis makes the best of it 
 
 Warner Bros 'Due Date' stars Zach Galifianakis (l.) as Ethan Tremblay and Robert Downey Jr. as Peter Highman. 
 
 An uptight architect and a needy actor are forced to take a road trip together. With Robert Downey Jr., Zach Galifianakis. Director: Todd Phillips (1:40). Rated R: Language, drug use, violence, sexuality. At area theaters. 
 
 Those hoping for another "Hangover" may be disappointed by Todd Phillips' punch-drunk followup, which is basically "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" for the road-rage generation. 
 
 Robert Downey Jr. is simmering straight man Peter, an architect who's on edge from the moment he meets Zach Galifianakis's flaky Ethan at the Atlanta airport. Peter is heading home to L.A. for the impending birth of his child, while aspiring actor Ethan is determined to guest-star on his favorite show, "Two and a Half Men." 
 
 Ethan's antics get them both kicked off the plane, though Peter's wallet remains on board. If he wants to get to California before his wife goes into labor, he'll have to hitch a ride with Ethan. Peter's already fighting to keep his temper in check, but he has no idea how bad things are going to get. 
 
 There are several laughs along the way, often courtesy of cameos from the likes of RZA, Danny McBride and Jamie Foxx. (Michelle Monaghan is given virtually nothing to do as Peter's pregnant wife.) And a couple of the set pieces, like the guys' disastrous detour into Mexico, are close to inspired. 
 
 But you'll need a far higher tolerance lever than Peter if you're going to make it all the way across the country with the obscenely irritating Ethan. 
 
 Galifianakis does make an effort to find Ethan's vulnerable side, but Phillips prefers to keep it hidden beneath grating tics and obvious jokes (he wears a Lilith Fair T-shirt and couldn't be prouder of his recent perm). 
 
 While Galifianakis commits to the absurdity with impressive dedication, Downey seems atypically uncomfortable through most of the movie. Honestly, it's hard to blame him. Like the direction, the script -- written by Phillips and three others -- veers all over the place before reaching its inevitable, unsurprising destination.
– Is Due Date this year’s Hangover? Not really, the critics say; it’s more “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles for the road rage generation,” writes Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News. Reviews are mixed, with only 40% of critics liking it but 75% of fans approving at Rotten Tomatoes: It’s a “recipe for nutso fun,” writes Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. Zach Galifianakis and Robert Downey Jr. “gift Due Date with something rare in any kind of movie: a soul.” Due Date is “kind of like the Odyssey, but with masturbation jokes and vomit,” notes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. She’s not particularly impressed, but “Galifianakis is good enough to make you almost forget the movie.” Weitzman disagrees, calling Galifianakis’ character “obscenely irritating” in her Daily News review. “Like the direction, the script veers all over the place before reaching its inevitable, unsurprising destination.”