2.5 stars (out of 5)
Vince Vaughn was appealing in French Canadian director Ken Scott’s Delivery Man (a shot-for-shot remake of Scott’s Starbuck), but in this follow-up he’s back to being grating, although he isn’t helped by a script that’s more puzzling than witty and a choppy look that suggests that this one was cut-and-pasted in a desperate attempt to make it work. It doesn’t.
In a weirdly abrupt opening scene we see Vaughn’s salesman Dan Trunkman getting a five percent pay cut from mean boss Chuck Portnoy (Sienna Miller) and deciding on the spot to get the Hell out and form his own company in direct competition. He does the whole “Who’s with me???” routine and finds himself in the parking lot with grumpy Timothy McWinters (Tom Wilkinson), who’s been forced to retire, and hopelessly dim Mike Pancake (Dave Franco), who only turned up for a failed job interview that day. One year later and after many hard times, the three are about to make their first major deal (involving selling ‘swarf’ – or was it ‘smarf?’), and are off to Portland to close, but after the expected humdrum misadventures, they discover that Chuck’s also after the same goal, and the screenplay gets surprisingly cruel as she’s made out to be a nasty bitch. Then the trio are forced to jet away to Germany to meet the big boss, only to variously find themselves in the midst of a G8 summit protest, almost driving into a reindeer, forming the basis of a live-in work of art, hanging out with a bong-smoking bunch of students and being threatened with a bunch of penises in a leather bar.
There’s much here that Scott and Co would have thought was surefire funny stuff (Nick Frost as a sweet if kinky business contact, James Marsden as a scumbag superior making orgasm gags), and yet nothing properly amuses, with Wilkinson sour and sex-mad and Franco’s moron more sad than giggle-inducing. Where did it all go wrong? What happened to the charm and tenderness of Starbuck and Delivery Man? Why does Steve Conrad’s script try so hard to be vulgar and crass and then wimp out with gooey niceness and family hugs? Why do the penises look so rubbery? Swarf/smarf it!!!
I Wake Up Screening 