About 20 minutes into this slightly misguided recasting of the holiday road classic "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" director Todd Philips (The Hangover) lets us in on what the movie is really after: a reconciliation, of sorts, with fathers who are absent. The circumstances are different for the two male leads: Peter (Robert Downey) hardly knew his father, having been abandoned by him at an early age; Ethan (Zack Galifianakis) on the other hand, can't quite come to terms with the very recent loss of his father and keeps his ashen remains in a used coffee jar.
This theme recurs somewhat sporadically through the rest of the film - amid the Mexican jail break, Grand canyon tour, and numerous highway and road stop mishaps. But at the aforementioned juncture, inside a roadhouse rest room, the film;'s tortured core crystallizes in a manner both poignant and humourous. Ethan is an aspiring actor, heading to Hollywood for his big break, and he's targeting the TV series Two and A Half Men, no less (the zeitgeist could hardly have converged more perfectly). Peter needs to arrive in L.A. in time for the birth of his first child.
Peter, by this time convinced that Ethan is worthless as an actor (and as a human being) engages him in an impromptu audition - the first scenario goes miserably bad, but the next, in which he has his opposite playing and NFL coach trying to rally his players while getting a call from his wife asking for a divorce, leads the "actor" into a remembrance of his father, at which he promptly breaks down.
Its just about the only transcendent moment in an otherwise prosaic and profane road movie. the profanity we can accept, Phillps and Co. put it to great use in The Hangover, but here, as exemplified in a blatantly pointless exchange between Peter and an airport security officer (played with callous disregard by raper RZA), its just tiresome.
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