As I bought my ticket to Ken Scott’s newest project “Unfinished Business”, I was excited to see what Vince Vaughn and Scott would bring to the table after “Delivery Man.” I was very wrong to be excited.
It seems like the Vince Vaughn of “Swingers” and “Wedding Crashers” is gone and nowhere to be found.
In “Unfinished Business” Vaughn plays the struggling family man, Dan Trunkman, as he quits his job to start a company called Apex Select, taking along with him colleagues Mike Pancake (Dave Franco) and Timothy McWinters (Tom Wilkinson).
After the first few scenes of Trunkman leaving his old job the movie skips to a year later showing the failures of Apex Select. Broke and desperate, Trunkman and company make a last ditch effort to close a deal with a European company to get some money for his family. Competing with his former boss Chuck Portnoy (Sienna Miller) for the contract, Trunkman and his band of business associates must travel across the globe to Germany to close the deal.
With this top-billed cast, I was expecting a lot more entertainment but it failed to deliver. The characters’ depth could have been explored more and the development of each character was very bland and basic. For example, Franco’s character Mike Pancake is a young guy whose views of the world are very naive at the beginning of the movie as he is the obvious airhead of the group. He plays the innocent virgin who asks the stupid and inappropriate questions that land the gang in some trouble throughout the movie.
I believe there could have been more use for Franco’s skill as an actor as he played a role completely opposite of what he did in “Neighbors.” In some scenes it was just sad to see an actor of Franco’s caliber squandered as his character would just sit there as eye candy for the audience. But in reality his character could have been great if his character’s attributes and development were tweaked just a tad.
On the opposite side of things Tom Wilkinson comes back to comedy after doing dramatic pictures like “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “Selma.” Wilkinson’s character, McWinters, is an old over-the-hill man who is looking for love and adventure in all the wrong places. I enjoyed the old man’s shenanigans during this movie and was one of the few highlights overall. Seeing Wilkinson acting like a college kid was definitely something to remember as you see him make passes at younger women and take bong rips with the kids.
The movie overall was mildly entertaining at best with only a few memorable quotes and quips. The R rating that came with this movie was expected as there was a great deal of vulgarity and nudity. The comedy was mediocre at best and this definitely fits under the genre of “popcorn flick.” I just hope Vaughn redeems his acting career as a he takes a more serious role in HBO’s “True Detective.”
