Movie reviews by Terry Burns
Film critic Terry Burns is the Technology Coordinator for the McNairy County Board of Education, and writes reviews as a hobby. His reviews also appear in The McNairy County News and The Lexington Progress. He says he has been a movie buff since he was a little boy. Burns is shown receiving the Tennessee Educational Technology Association’s Howard Cisco Outstanding Leadership Award for Technology Innovation for 2009-10.
If you would like to contact Terry, his e-mail address is burns984@bellsouth.net
His movie rating scale:
Five stars plus - as good as it gets
Five stars - don’t miss
Four stars - excellent
Three stars - good
Two stars - fair
One star - poor
No stars - don’t bother
Due Date
Dull Due Date DownerDue Date, R, ***, Robert Downey Jr., Zach Galifianakis, Juliette Lewis, Jamie Foxx, Michelle Monaghan. Warner Bros. film, Director Todd Phillips. Length 95 minutes.
A short verse from the song Hold on I’m Coming by Sam and Dave plays at the first of this movie. It is appropriate because Peter (Robert Downey Jr) is trying to travel to Los Angeles to be with his wife, Sarah (Michelle Monaghan), when she has their baby.
Peter is in Atlanta, Georgia boarding an airplane to Los Angeles when Ethan Tremblay (Zach Galifianakis) causes a disturbance before the plane leaves the ground. As result of this fiasco, Peter and Zach are banned from flying.
Ethan is obnoxious and a total nut. From this point until the end of the movie, he continues to cause trouble for Peter.
Peter reluctantly decides to travel in Ethan’s car to Los Angeles. They both need to be there by Friday. Ethan is going to audition for an acting job, and of course, Peter needs to be there for the birth of his child.
The road trip is a total disaster. The audience witnesses lots of slapstick humor along with crude, rural, and socially unacceptable antics. The script and acting go over the top with way to much ridiculous humor. Sometimes less is more. In this case more is way too much.
The viewer will laugh out loud a few times, but it is not enough to bring this little movie to the top of the comedy films. Galifianakis is his usual over the top comedic self, and Downey Jr. inhabits his part with a little too much enthusiasm.
Too much juvenile humor and ridiculous scenes that weighs heavy on the audience. There are some awkward moments when Peter’s college buddy Darryl (Jamie Foxx) tries to help his friend get to Los Angeles.
An event at the Mexican border is funny, but it turns out to use too many car crashes.
An appropriate title could very well be “How to survive an extremely crazy friend.” The paranoia, jealousy, and insecurity that sometimes inhabit a person’s mind when events take place that cause one to question the faithfulness of a spouse arise in this over the top comedy.
Robert Downey Jr. does some great work, and so does Ethan Galifianakis, but this one just lacked a connection that this viewer was hoping to observe.
