So The King’s Speech is the Great Movie of last year, winning all sorts of awards and universal acclaim. And I have to say, I’m not sure I understand why.

There’s nothing wrong with the movie; it’s a perfectly decent film about the friendship between Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush, and it’s well-acted and everything, but… there’s just not a lot of there there. It’s not unusually brilliant in any way, it’s just a stolid, decent film. I guess it won the awards based on it being about British royalty and being a period piece and featuring an actor with an obvious speech impediment, but those aren’t good reasons. Don’t believe the hype, but go ahead and see it anyway.

And meanwhile, Due Date looked fucking terrible. It’s Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis on a zany cross-country road trip, where hijinks ensue. Sounds horrid, right? Except: Those two are great comic actors, and even medium-decent lines are funny in their hands.

And the film isn’t nearly as horrid as you’d think, with like maybe 1% of the hideous gender role bullshit that you’d expect a movie like this to have (particularly surprising considering that the goal is to meet up with Robert Downey Jr’s wife, who is scheduled to pop out a kid - this is totally an open invitation for “omg chained down” man-child bullshittery, but the movie declines that invitation to its credit). So this one ends up being the opposite of The King’s Speech: It’s also pretty decent, but that means I was way underrating it.