Avoid mucky business
An uneasy mix of boys on tour sexploits and saccharine schmaltz, this adult comedy, as its title suggests, feels underdone.
Pitched somewhere between The Inbetweeners, National Lampoon’s European Vacation and The Internship, the film tries to coast by on the twin assets (apart from those of assorted continental ladies) of Vince Vaughn’s motormouth charm and the normally straitlaced Tom Wilkinson ( The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) behaving badly – with limited success.
The plot sees mineral sales company hot shot Dan Trunkman (Vaughn) going it alone after his company rewards his record sales with a pay cut. Only able to persuade a burned out accountant (Wilkinson) and an naive interviewee (Dave Franco) to go with him, a year later the office of Apex Select is still a Dunkin’ Donuts and the bills are racking up. All Dan’s hopes rest on a deal he’s been working on the past 12 months, but just when he thinks he’s a handshake away from a grand pay day, his old boss swoops in, undercuts him and leaves him and his cohorts scrambling to get halfway around the world to try to rescue the contract.
Best known for FrenchCanadian comedies Seducing Dr Lewis and Starbuck and their less than successful US remakes ( The Grand Seduction and Delivery Boy), writer-director Ken Scott’s first true Hollywood comedy feels like the cinematic equivalent of the construction industry swarf that Trunkman and his team are peddling. There are moments of hilarity (Vaughn’s character staying in an art installation, his judicious use of the FaceTime face freeze), but they feel like shavings of other, better comedies, with the movie bulked up by filler, domestic tribulations that sit uneasily beside Unfinished Business’s broader themes and a less than healthy dose of sexism.
The premise may have echoes of Jerry Maguire, but a date movie this isn’t, with its combination of bullying behaviour and virtually non-existent female characters making it a film more interested in displaying mammaries than making memories.
Prime, Monday, 9.30pm
Who’d be a bachelor boy?
TV3 signalled months ago that a New Zealand version of the US reality show The Bachelor would be one of its big guns for 2015. Now, we get to find out if they have loaded the right ammunition. Maybe it was only a matter of time before the format turned up in a local version. After all, it’s been going in the US for 13 years and many other countries since then. This week, we finally learn who is The Bachelor, and what kinds of women want him for themselves.
TV3, Tuesday, 7.30pm
TV One, Wednesday, 8.30pm
The feminine magic touch
New TV magicians seem to be popping up with alarming regularity these days, but the latest one from the UK has a major point of difference: she’s a woman. Katherine Mills is one of the few female magicians to break into that normally male-dominated field of entertainment and says she was inspired to do so by Dynamo. The graduate in social psychology specialises in ‘‘reading’’ people, so it’s no surprise that she would title her series Katherine Mills: Mind Games. Prepare to be played!
TV One, Thursday, 7.30pm
Hamish and Andy get antsy
Why, oh why would you do this? As if Aussie comedy duo Hamish and Andy haven’t done enough damage to themselves, this week the Hamish half of the pair accepts a challenge to wear a pair of gloves housing hundreds of biting bullet ants, said to be the most painful sting known to man. It’s all about proving one’s manhood, you see. They then attempt a marathon run on the Amazon River in Zorb balls. Perhaps not surprisingly, this is the last episode in the series Hamish & Andy’s Gap Year: South America. Just as well, as they have clearly been out in the sun too long. TV3, Friday, 7.30pm. One of the hidden gems of last year’s New Zealand International Film Festival, this Norwegian black comedy has echoes of the work of Guy Ritchie and David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. Snow-ploughman Nils’s (Stellan Skarsgard) exploits recently won him a citizen of the year award, but when his son is ‘‘mistakenly’’ murdered, he seeks revenge on the gangsters he believes perpetrated the crime, sparking a full-on turf war. Released under the name Power Idiot in Norway.