Well, it's funnier that last collaboration between star Vince Vaughn and director Ken Scott—a little ditty called THE DELIVERY MAN. From an original screenplay from Steve Conrad, UNFINISHED BUSINESS doesn't waste any time getting things rolling as it opens with a verbal battle in the office between Vaughn's Dan Trunkman (who is some kind of salesman) and boss Chuck Portnoy (Sienna Miller) over his having to take a pay cut in one of his best years in recent memory. It's a familiar argument for many, I'm sure, and there's nothing meant to be especially funny about the exchange, until Dan opts to quit and turns his leaving into a JERRY MAGUIRE moment by asking who else in the office will join him to start his own company. He gets no legit takers.
Instead what he gets is an elderly colleague Timothy McWinters (Tom Wilkinson), who has just been let go due to mandatory retirement, and Mike Pancake (Dave Franco), a young man who just happened to be in the office for a job interview and liked Dan's spirit. They sit down to plan out their future, and a year later, they are on the verge of closing their biggest deal to date, the one that's going to pull each of them out of serious financial difficulties. The three head out on an overnight business trip to handshake on the deal, and before long, they realize the deal is far from closed and that their chief competitor is the one run by Dan's old boss. Then the David vs. Goliath story kicks in with decidedly mixed results.
UNFINISHED BUSINESS has moments in it that are genuinely of the time we're living in. Times are still tough for many, and businessmen like Dan are still having trouble find comparable jobs to the ones they had before the economy took a nose dive. So most of the scenes involving that aspect of the story specifically aren't really meant to be humorous, which feels strange in a Vince Vaughn movie. But coming from writer Steven Conrad (THE PROMOTION), it's makes some degree of sense. But somewhere along the line, the filmmakers panicked, fearing that no one would come see a film about the hard times of three, upper-middle-class white dudes. So bring on the dick jokes, the gay jokes, the jokes involving the fact that Franco's character is vaguely autistic or mentally challenged or brain damaged (no lie). At first you just think he's a Midwest rube, but when he starts talking about a group home he lives in, the laughter cuts off with an almost audible snap.
The film also decides to dive headfirst into the world of school bullying. You see, Dan's son is overweight and being picked on at school and online, so Dan and his wife are planning on sending him to a private school (which is one of the many reasons Dan needs this deal to work). If this were just a one-off moment in the film, that would be one thing, but UNFINISHED BUSINESS keeps coming back to this uninteresting and distracting subplot, perhaps attempting to make us all recognize the bully in ourselves. I certainly did want to punch this movie in the nuts at times, so I guess it worked.
The film's weird jokes are just tossed in randomly, but rarely get a sustained laugh. When the boys have to fly to Berlin to secure their shaky deal, Dan is forced to stay in a hotel room that is actually an exposed art exhibition where people can come and watch him be an American businessman. Timothy becomes obsessed with having sex with someone other than his horrible wife, whom he wishes to divorce as soon as he has the money to do so. And Mike simply wants to have business trip exploits—the kind he's heard so much about—which he certainly gets. One memorable series of events happens in a men's room at a gay bar during a major fetish convention in the city. I won't say what happens exactly, but I firmly believe that getting dick slapped is probably not the worst thing that's ever happened to Dave Franco. Does that count as bullying? I'm sorry.
Even the usually reliable James Marsden and Nick Frost—coming in later in the film as reps from the company with whom Dan is trying to close the deal—can't really save this awkward, sloppy, seemingly endless mess of a movie. And I don't mean to imply I didn't laugh on occasion. Hearing Wilkinson swear makes me laugh every time; Franco has a few good scenes; and yes, even the men's room scene made me laugh heartily at times. But the spaces between either laughs or some sort of profound message about enduring tough times are endless, and this is only a 90-minute movie. But somehow it still feels padded and extraordinarily long.
UNFINISHED BUSINESS isn't the worst Vince Vaughn movie I've ever seen; hell, it's not even the worse of his I've seen in the last two years. But that doesn't make it any less of a frustrating mess of a movie. I'm genuinely curious what he's going to bring to the table with the next installment of HBO's "True Detective," and maybe that will spark some kind of creative revival in him. Or we'll get more of the same. At this point, I'm on the verge of not caring.
