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. ||||| 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. ||||| Melinda Sue Gordon / Warner Bros. 
 
 Todd Phillips’ deliberately offensive films have always courted controversy, but The Hangover Part III marks a tonal shift for his successful franchise. The movie is so aggressively nasty and barely funny that it feels as though Phillips is trying to cull his own Wolfpack down to only the most hardcore fans. The tagline on The Hangover Part III’s posters is “The end,” and there may be some wish fulfillment implied. The Hangover Part III gives off such a stench of creative decay that it hardly seems possible that even Phillips or his co-writers have any use for the movie themselves. If a movie can be self-loathing and self-destructive, it’s this one. 
 
 Even the impetus behind the journey, which does include a trip back to Las Vegas, the scene of the wickedly fun original, is bleak. Instead of a rollicking bachelor party enhanced by drugs, there’s a funeral, followed by an intervention. Alan (Zach Galifianakis) has been off his meds for six months when the movie begins. He is enticed to enter a treatment facility in Arizona by a promise that Phil (Bradley Cooper) and the rest of the Wolfpack — Stu (Ed Helms) and the guy who always gets left behind, Alan’s brother-in-law Doug (Justin Bartha) — will drive him there. Of course, the trip to Arizona is derailed — and the purpose of it completely forgotten — by an encounter with a drug-lord-type named Marshall (John Goodman) and his henchmen, including “Black Doug” from the first film. Marshall demands the guys find and bring him Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong), who double-crossed him around the time of the first Hangover. 
 
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 Alan’s specific mental-health issue has remained vague throughout the series, but whatever it is, it leads to some spectacularly dunderheaded and mean behavior. In his first scene in The Hangover Part III, Alan drives down the freeway pulling a wagon with a giraffe upright in it. It’s his new pet. The giraffe is obviously almost entirely computer-generated but still looks smart, soulful, friendly. It is decapitated by an overpass and the severed head plunges nose first into the windshield of an approaching car. The preview audience I was with seemed stunned into silence. Not by what had happened — the outcome is telegraphed from the beginning of the scene — but by a sort of larger why? Hardly anyone laughed. 
 
 What a contrast to the hilarity of the sight gag of that tiger in the bathroom of the Vegas hotel in the original movie. Even the abused, penis-nibbling monkey in The Hangover Part II seems slightly amusing in comparison. The dead giraffe served no purpose except to be grossly provocative. As oily pretty-boy Phil, Cooper demonstrated in the two earlier movies an uncanny ability to make almost any line funny, but here he’s reached his limits. It’s not Cooper’s fault, but the screenwriters’. No one, not Ernie Kovacs or Johnny Carson or Mel Brooks or even Chris Rock could make Phil’s line “Oh, come on, he killed a giraffe. Who gives a [expletive]?” funny. Other jokes that fail involve the cruel ends of a pair of guard dogs and some chickens trained for cockfighting and fueled on a diet of cocaine. They are variously shot, smothered, drugged, etc. 
 
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 The threat to the dogs even causes the cynical Phil to protest. “I didn’t know you worked for PETA,” says Mr. Chow (Jeong, reprising his role from the earlier films). “What a [expletive].” Maybe that line is supposed to make the audience feel chagrined about being such softies as well, but it isn’t witty enough to work. I suppose the dumb beasts give the steadily ridiculed character of Mr. Chow someone to look down on. Homophobia and underlying racism directed at Asians permeate this movie just as they did the others, with the ambiguously sexed Mr. Chow — he had or has a wife but, like Alan, can’t stop drooling over handsome Phil — subject to considerable verbal abuse. 
 
 Despite everything, Jeong has turned playing Mr. Chow into some strange art form. He gives the character radical style and confidence; no wonder Mr. Chow has become the central figure in The Hangover Part III. Phillips perhaps couldn’t make another movie without him (although, blessedly, that promise that this is “the end” does seem serious). The impish, outrageous mischief maker is the only force propelling the movie forward, unless you count the romantic subplot involving Galifianakis’ Alan and Melissa McCarthy’s pawn-shop proprietor, which is of a piece with the usual insulting mainstream grotesquerie involving the sexuality of the overweight. The Hangover Part III is such a misery that when Mr. Chow directs the Wolfpack to “stay low, like dog” it might as well be the film’s motto. 
 
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– 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.”