It’s no surprise to see Vince Vaughn, but we haven’t the foggiest as to what Tom Wilkinson, Dave Franco, Sienna Miller, James Marsden and Nick Frost are doing here, if they’re not in it for the salary. This mirthless, mercenary comedy is beneath all of them, even Vaughn, although this seems to be the kind of vehicle to which he hitches his wagon all too often these days. Dan, (Vaughn) Timothy, (Wilkinson) and Mike (Franco) are the sole employees of a start-up that’s relying on a make-or-break deal with a European client. In a bid to close the deal, the three of them to set off for a business trip to Germany. When they run into Dan’s former boss Chuck, (Miller) they realise that their company may be the ‘fluffer’ company, brought in as a bargaining chip so that the clients (Marsden and Frost) can sweeten their deal with the market leader. Desperate to win the contract so that his business can stay afloat and he can afford send his bullied son to a private school, Dan goes all out to try and win the deal back from Chuck. Granted, there can’t have been much on the page to begin with, (cock jokes notwithstanding) but the film is further afflicted by terrible performances. Many of the actors in this stellar cast have never been worse than they are here – the sheer amount of restlessness on-screen in each and every scene is suffocating. But in a film that’s very hard to be good in, a couple of them manage to be actively terrible. Not content to cast Franco as the Charlie Day or Zach Galifianakis substitute, his Mike Pancake (hahahaha, no) is actually a ‘special school’ alumnus, and he plays the whole thing at around the intellectual level of Tropic Thunder‘s Simple Jack. It’s unfortunate to have to declare this one dead on arrival, if you were led to expect anything different by the last collaboration between Vaughn and director Ken Scott. Delivery Man, their English language remake of Scott’s own French-Canadian sperm donor comedy Starbuck, was at least a cut above some of Vaughn’s more putrid output in recent years, bolstered by supporting turns from Cobie Smulders and Chris Pratt, who both went on to better things at Marvel Studios. Unfinished Business misses them sorely, but then it’s hard to imagine they’d have found any more to work with than any of the talented supporting cast who did fall into it. We could go on all day exploring the lengths and depths of how they got it wrong, but Unfinished Business is damned by its own choice of wacky occupation. Swarf selling is the name of the game for Dan et al. If you’re unfamiliar, swarf is the debris from wood and metal manufacturing processes which the film assures us is totally a real business. This film also feels like the detritus of an industrial process, cobbled together from the shavings of other comedies that were box office hits, scraping away at the very souls of its talented cast, and ultimately sold on to consumers by bland and unlikeable suits. At least they’re laughing all the way to the bank, but it’s a rather more sobre venture for the rest of us. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
