Unpolished instead of ‘Unf inished’ more apt
(4) UNFINISHED BUSINESS. Starring Vince Vaughn, Dave Franco, Tom Wilkinson, Sienna Miller, Jil Funke, David C Bunners, David Akinloye. Directed by Ken Scott. Reviewed by Robbie Collin.
UNFINISHED Business certainly lives up to the promise of its title: the film looks as though it needs another six months’ work.
Vince Vaughn stars – and for many, that will be all the review required – as Dan Trunkman, a hard-pressed father whose job takes him and two dunderheaded colleagues (Tom Wilkinson, Dave Franco) to Europe in pursuit of a life-changing contract.
Wilkinson plays a foul-mouthed, highly sexed, drug-taking curmudgeon, while Franco has the more straightforward village idiot role, which he seems to be playing under heavy sedation. Vaughn, meanwhile, falls back on the old jabber-and-sweat routine that’s served him so poorly in the past.
Drunken carnage and (female) nudity are commonplace – of course they all visit a unisex steam room, and Wilkinson’s character hires an escort – but Dan, bastion of modern manhood that he is, still finds the time to check in with his troubled kids via Skype.
After the obligatory road trip section, capped by a scene in which the trio write-off their car by deliberately driving headlong into a deer, our heroes arrive in Berlin, which is playing host to, simultaneously: a G8 conference and protest, a contemporary art festival, Oktoberfest, the Berlin Marathon, and a gay fetish jamboree.
The script, by Steve Conrad ( The Pursuit of Happyness, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty), hauls the characters through each event to remind them there’s more to life than work, although the alternatives it suggests – methamphetamine and gay panic figure largely – look horrifying.
Sienna Miller pops up every now and then in the role of Dan’s vile former boss, to remind us just how awful successful women are.
The director is Ken Scott, whose previous comedy with Vaughn, the sperm-donation caper Delivery Man, languished in the same spurious middle-ground between pop-eyed raunch and mawkish self-help tract. But somehow, this is even worse.