Unfinished Business Movie Review

Unfinished Business is the latest Vince Vaughn comedy, a movie about three businessmen who travel to Germany to secure a business deal.

Vince Vaughn found some success with a series of comedies in the early 2000s, like Dodgeball and Wedding Crashers starrring alongside Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson, but his recent work has not been received as well.

Maybe it was just me, but — unfortunately for a comedy film — most of the jokes fell flat. Vince Vaughn’s character himself was not amusing and there was too much reliance upon toilet and sex humour trying to elicit laughs.

The story is fairly formulaic – the protagonists need to travel overseas for some reason, have wacky experiences, face some adversity to achieve their goal, and end up at home and happy.

Vaughn plays family man Dan Trunkman who leaves his job at a high profile sales firm to strike out on his. Accompanying him are Tom Wilkinson as Timothy McWinters, who just happened to be forcibly retired on the same day because of his age and Dave Franco as Mike Pancake, the young kid who was at the office for an interview but didn’t get the job.]

In one scene Vaughn has to walk into a nude bathhouse in order to convince a german lady to lower her prices so that he can get a better profit margin and she forces him to strip naked in order to agree.

Another scene is in the toilet of a gay club where his character is propositioned for a blowjob. One of whom belongs to a contact they need to speak with about the business deal.

Seeing people’s boobs and dicks on screen is apparently meant to be intrinsically funny, but it just isn’t.

Dave Franco provided the best performance, but a film isn’t meant to rely upon a supporting actor to carry it to success.

The comedy in the film is pitched towards a younger audience, but a man in his mid forties running around Berlin while thinking about his kids back home is not a character who that audience will identify with.

Before he leaves Vaughn’s character’s daughter asks him to complete some homework about “what he is”, there are several times throughout the film he spends inner-monologueing to himself about his responsibilities to his family and his team.

There also comes a time when watching a supposedly grown man acting like a twenty year old stops being funny and starts being sad.