Audio By Carbonatix
Making a movie starring Zach Galifainakis and Robert Downey Jr. is kind of like making Jell-O: The result is awesome, and it’s pretty difficult to fuck up. And sure enough, for about its first half, the trailer for Due Date makes the movie look like what it should be: a laid-back, occasionally dark, occasionally silly comedy of social alienation and redemption — and that may very well be what the movie is. The trailer, though, by its second half, might as well be Michael Bay’s 90-minute comedy adaptation of a Velvet Revolver promo video.
To be fair, the first 40 seconds of this trailer are brilliant, and you’ve really got to hand it to whoever put it together for letting that first quiet joke play out for almost a third of the trailer’s full length. Then the generic rock music comes in — and, oh, surprise! — there’s where it cuts out for a one-liner. The one-liners are strong, certainly (again, Zach Galifainakis and Robert Downer Jr. are both awesome), and yeah, the old cut-the-music trick is a time-tested one, but really. At a certain point, this trailer just becomes an exercise in how many times you can cram that trick into two minutes and get away with it. And in that respect, the answer is “not that many.” At least not every seven seconds, you can’t.
The true moment of transcendent ridiculousness doesn’t come until about 1:30, though, with a fast-cut montage so seizure-inducing it borders on sadism. Which kind of makes sense — you’d have to be a sadist to fuck up Jell-O like this.
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