Unfinished Business is an exhausted wheeze of a comedy. It plays like trying to hurry off to a business meeting while your desk and work computer are wrapped around your waist slowing down your every step. Director Ken Scott, working off a screenplay by hack writer Steven Conrad (the still inexplicable The Weather Man and the recent Secret Life of Walter Mitty remake), has made a dismal and largely unfunny movie that feels tethered to a million misbegotten ideas and bad gags. And as if it’s not enough to be a laugh-scarce romp, the movie also has to squeeze in some severely mawkish heart-tugging moments. But the further it gets the more you realize those parental anxieties are just props with no other purpose other than expressing the urgency of making it in the business world and the worse they mesh with everything else going on. “Unfinished” might be nice actually. “Overcooked” would be far more apt.
That labored, overwritten quality is arguably most evident in the gimmicky names given to the main characters (each feels doled out with either the consideration of spicing up the comedy or avoiding lawsuits from resembling real-life people). Vince Vaughn plays Dan Trunkman. The movie begins as he’s in the midst of an argument with his boss (Sienna Miller, who goes by Chuck for some reason) after she has broken the news that despite all his hard work he will be taking a 5% pay cut with everyone else at the company. Her salary, of course, will not be affected by any cuts. He quits on the spot–though not before trying in vain to rally his co-workers to a new break-off venture. Leaving the office for the last time he’s joined in the parking lot by an older co-worker who’s just been let go for exceeding their age limit (Tim McWinters, played by Tom Wilkinson) and a fresh-faced interviewee (the absurdly named Mike Pancake, played by Dave Franco). One has nothing to lose, the other no experience beyond Foot Locker, so this trio quickly gets to work. Together they look horribly mismatched, like a spectrum tracking life from youth to old age and have to make a Dunkin’ Donuts their office, but fast forward one year and they’re actually in a position to compete with their old company.
And what business are they in exactly, you might ask? As silly and weird as the names are , the specifics of their industry are blandly generic and dull, which is probably part of the point (something to do with metal residue after large-scale construction). Not one of them speaks of it with any particular passion, and how could they? It’s purely a means to an end. In Unfinished Business, that dollar-sign chase takes them first to Portland where they wrongly figure they’ll close the deal then to Berlin, where most of this staggeringly long 90 minute pic takes place.
The movie grinds itself down thinking of contrived scenarios for the three of them to get themselves into. One of them entails Dan not being able to book a hotel room which leaves him with no choice but to shack up in an abstract art museum exhibit called “American Businessman 42” which means his life is a show and much to his irritation he becomes a viral celebrity. There’s also the aging, slightly perverted Tim’s obsession with “wheelbarrow position” sex (and the slow-witted Mike’s inability to grasp the tricky logistics of it) and the exhausting bit about Mike’s last name being a breakfast food (and a source of endless distraction in meetings with potential clients). The hardest to watch-and recover from-is a scene that finds them in the bathroom of a gay bar where men of various endowment slide their penis through a hole. It’s as tacky as it sounds and gets even worse when one of them “shakes hands” with and then proceeds to fall face first into the man’s member.
The jokes too are baffling or inarguably bad (“50 Shades of Grey? I’d settle for one shade of grey”and “Snoop Lion” instead of “Snoop Dogg”). Scott finds no innate comedic energy in the material, which is not purely his fault given the caliber of the writing though watching you can’t help but wonder if he could’ve provided some wit where what’s on paper falls out or flat. All of this awkwardness and party-hard mindlessness and crudity just makes the soggy moments where Vince Vaughn’s character has to phone home to his overweight and endlessly bullied preteen son while dialing up his soft, sensitive side so obnoxious. His primary consideration is whether he’ll be able to afford the tuition to a good private school for his kid, but it’s apparent how little that means beyond cuing up the stakes of the deal. And much as Scott’s direction is visually and sonically nondescript, tonally it’s confusingly out of whack. One can walk and chew gun at the same time, sure, but the penis jokes and the feels Unfinished Business tries to simultaneously put out just don’t mix.
Fans of Vince Vaughn may have the second season of True Detective to look forward to, but he’s such a gifted actor you can’t help but wishing he was in movies in somewhat worthy of his impish charm and self-effacing verbosity. Swingers is nearly twenty years behind him now and Wedding Crashers an entire decade, but even as he looks just a little older and heavier now, he’s still a sharp, lively comedic performer who is better than anything he’s been in for many moons. Here you may well feel as I did: a little worn out by him and yet also feeling like he wasn’t afforded enough room to do what he does best. It’s even more difficult watching Tom Wilkinson lowering his usually high standards just months after his fine portrayal of LBJ in Selma. And though she mostly makes it out unscathed (she’s in just few enough scenes to be able to), roughly the same goes for Sienna Miller fresh off her enviable performances in both Foxcatcher and American Sniper.
Perhaps for those reasons, it’s easiest to watch Dave Franco. He’s annoying, no question. And some of the comedy comes from how amusingly virginal he looks wearing short-sleeved dress shirts and pushing around a roller-case. But Franco, with his goofy oblivious air and irrepressible bong-hit grin, makes this good-natured idiot the most enjoyably stupid thing in a long slog of a movie. It’s not saying much with a bar set this low (unlike last year in Neighbors when he stole the show from his costars Seth Rogen and Zac Efron), and it probably won’t be remembered even a few months from now, nor does it need to be, but in the arduous assignment that is this movie he along with Nick Frost as the businessman they must woo, ably avoids a pink slip. Everyone else was foolish for even interviewing.
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