It’s not often that a chance to see a film that is not on general release till the following week comes up, but courtesy of a random email arriving along with another set of mails asking if I pay too much for car insurance, the opportunity did indeed arise late on Friday night, ahead of the Halloween naughty that was to follow the next day.

It’s kind of like having an additional piece of knowledge which you can use against people and feel smug about, though only in the forums known as “pub quizzes” and also handy for writing occasional film reviews on a lowly blog site.

I’d better get onto the main subject of today’s review before it goes past its Due Date (see what I did there, har har har etc…..I live alone.)

There are two main characters we pretend to care about in this story of woe across the wonderful Disneyland of America, Robert Downey baby, who has enjoyed a great deal of deserved success since his comeback from being on the single female lawyer show, Ally Mcbeal, and a bloke with accompanying beard called Zach Galifianakis, who we last saw as a bloke with accompanying beard in the film The Hangover, in which various drunks tried to replay what happened during a night out in Vegas after loosing the groom.

I dare anyone to say Zach Galifianakis 10 times fast without going to hear from the internet how to pronounce that surname of his, which also could double as the name of a Greek detective who fights crime while making a mean mousaka. So basically here we are with a fresh new “roadtrip” film, and with that, three brand new lifelines; fifty-fifty, phone a friend and the get out of jail free card nicked from Monopoly as the audience died of malnutrition.

Robert Downey 4-year-old plays Peter Highman (yes, Highman, which is funny in itself if you say it fast, though perhaps it’s a slightly worse surname given the drug filled past of Mr. Downey infant in the first place, but never mind, only cynical burned out husks of human beings ever dwell on such matters….) who is once again successful and heading home to see his wife perform a ping-pong ball trick out of her private area, except it’s a baby, not a ball flaying across the room this time.

Cue Mr Beard coming into focus and basically screwing up Mr Downey midget’s well laid out plans to fly back, in a series of “oh, we could never see any of that coming a mile off, how simple we must be” moments before the film actually does start to get going with the main premise that these two gents end up travelling with each other to Los Angles in order to witness the ping-pong ball trick.

Now the problem with writing about a film of this particular type is that you can make some comments, but they ultimately fly short without any examples. There were some truly great laugh out load bits, mainly at the hands of Mr Downey not-so-junior-any-more more than Mr Beard, and it would take some uncaring, unsympathetic tw*t to spoil it all for you here in text.

From the rampant masturbation (I’m not kidding, though you’ll be surprised at who does it) to the fun being high at the Mexican border, there is a lot of different situations packed into the movie which are all designed to make you cry and laugh at the same time, in similar fashion to the aformention Hangover film. Some of them really do succeed with more than enough gusto, while the relatively talk heavy portions of the film tend to just be so lame, they could have taken the scenes out the back and shot them dead.

The film is more centred on Mr. Beard as it appears to be more his comic vehicle that gets crashed repeatedly rather than his co-star, and when the focus is truly on said beard with alleged man attached, there are certain times where he comes off more as just annoying to the point of wanting to shove a damp sock in his mouth, and that has nothing to do with the character, it is in fact the actor on this occasion which is the recipient of the anger that dwells within me.

But really in some ways, because of the sheer volume of road trip movies that have been released, this film does lead us down some very predictable paths, such as learning about various personal pains and man-bonding, as well as inflicting lots of physical pain in the process. It could have been just a series of comic sketches aka Saturday Night Live in the US, and I doubt anyone would have noticed a difference.

The jokes involving the perm have no right to be called jokes at all. They are lying liers and deserve to be convicted in a comic court, then sentenced to life imprisonment without ever seeing the light of day ever again.

But if all you are after is just some laughs and forget about everything else, it’s a film where you can happily waste a few hours watching and not feel as cheated as you were when your wife was caught in bed with the bin man and your son was in fact his, a slight theme which does actually come up during the film to a point, but with sports star, not bin man. So by all means, make a night of it, there have been far worse releases this year, haven’t there Mr. Expendables?

Due Date is out in the UK on the 5th November. As I will be, after being released back into the community after serving time for crimes against helpless toilet paper.