TORONTO — The second collaboration by Canadian director Ken Scott (Delivery Man) and actor Vince Vaughn is Unfinished Business, an adult comedy about three business men who travel to Germany to seal a big deal.
Not everything goes smoothly, of course.
Vaughn stars opposite Dave Franco (Neighbors) and Tom Wilkinson (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel).
Does Unfinished Business deliver laughs? Here’s a look at some of the reviews.
Bruce Kirkland of QMI Agency said Unfinished Business “has a big heart, a tiny brain and a lot of bad attitude.
“That turns it into a murky mess as a movie.”
He opined that the movie is a reflection of its title. “More editing and a few re-shoots might have turned it into a mild mediocrity instead of this numbskull disaster,” wrote Kirkland.
At Vulture, Bilge Ebiri described Unfinished Business as being at war with itself.
“It wants to be serious — and it is — but it wants to try to deliver the comedic goods as well,” wrote Ebiri.
“Sometimes, the tonal dissonance works. But the laughs here are dry, not uproarious, and they’re just unsettling enough to work.”
Jesse Hassenger of the A.V. Club noted a lack of chemistry between the movie’s main stars.
“The three capable actors struggle to create the impression that they’ve known each other for more than a few weeks, even though the big business trip takes place after they’ve spent a year as their company’s only employees,” Hassenger said.
READ MORE: What the critics are saying about other recent movies
Variety critic Justin Chang conceded it is hard to deliver a good buddy comedy “when two of the buddies in question are such narrative deadweights.”
He wrote: “If Franco emerges from his brother’s shadow one day, it’ll probably be for a role that requires him to do more than grin like an idiot, butcher the English language, and model adventurous sexual positions with various Teutonic babes.
“Meanwhile, watching randy old Tim do things like enlist the services of a naughty French maid is enough to make you weep, if only because you wish Wilkinson had made it through his career without having to utter the words ‘I’m not seeing enough titty.'”
Roger Moore of Tribune News Service seemed to agree, calling Vaughn the film’s best actor.
“He spends the 91 minutes of this seriously laugh-starved comedy trying to pretend he doesn’t want to strangle Dave Franco,” he wrote.
Moore said Franco’s performance inspires instant loathing.
“His grinning, mousy-voiced, perhaps savant sexual innocent will drive you a little crazy. His upstaged co-stars certainly could be excused for throttling him between takes.”
At The Independent, Geoffrey MacNab called Unfinished Business “a very goofy comedy with a script that opts for jokes about glory holes and penis sizes over meaningful characterisation.”
Movie Fanatic writer Joel D Amos declared Unfinished Business “another miss” from Vaughn.
“There are plenty of laugh out loud moments, but they all arise from Vaughn being Vaughn, Franco pushing the ‘is he crazy or brilliant’ envelope and Wilkinson as a man who has lived so restricted for so long, that this may be his last chance at getting wild,” Amos wrote.
“Perhaps Vaughn should stop finding the heartwarming in films (like in Delivery Man and The Internship) and focus on just being a spoke in the wheel of a funny film that doesn’t apologize for what it is (like The Watch).”
Sam Cohen of Under The Gun Review said he took his glasses off about an hour into watching the movie and “had little interest to put them back on.”
He wrote: “Instead of trying to shock and mine laughs from the audience through raunch, director Ken Scott’s newest is so bored in trying to tell a story that it lulls you to sleep. The wave of earnest messages the film tries to employ gets caught under the berating of unfunny jokes.”
In USA Today, Brian Truitt described Unfinished Business as “a bland road-trip film that falls flat while heaping on the raunchiness.”
Truitt added: “There is actually a heartwarming drama about a father and his kids at its heart, but Unfinished Business spends too much time on egregiously unfunny jokes involving sexual positions and Fifty Shades of Grey.
“This film is just bad Business for everyone involved.”
Comments