Due Date

Todd Phillips’s 2010 film was sold as a road comedy, but the director describes it differently: one man about to become a father, another who has just buried his. The editing bears that out. A heroin joke about Ethan’s dead father was cut, because Phillips did not want the sadness disturbed. The second line is a refusal to be likeable. Robert Downey Jr. calls the part an invitation to get in touch with everything that annoys him about everyone. His character punches a child and spits in a dog’s face; Downey notes the pushback came for the dog, not the child. The dialogue was not fixed. Phillips says Downey worked like a second writer in the room, with long discussions every morning; Galifianakis puts them at an hour or more a day. The loose, restarting rhythm partly comes from that. The story is credited to Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland, with Phillips and Adam Sztykiel on the screenplay. It opened in November 2010 to 32 million dollars and passed 211 million worldwide. It runs ninety five minutes. A good fit if you can take a lead never made likeable and want the fatherhood line rather than the mileage. Not for anyone expecting the crowd energy of The Hangover; this is two men, one car and a dog.