Unfinished Business review: True Detective can't arrive fast enough for Vince Vaughn

Director: Ken Scott; Screenwriter: Steve Conrad; Starring: Vince Vaughn, Dave Franco, Tom Wilkinson, Sienna Miller, June Diane Raphael, Nick Frost, James Marsden; Running time: 91 mins; Certificate: 15

Vince Vaughn's desperate need for a career recharge hits a critical point with his latest comedy Unfinished Business, a story of three down-and-out salesmen who form their own company and head to Europe in a bid to close a deal ahead of a competitor.

The film aims to harness the spirit of Vaughn's best comedies from a decade ago,Old School and Dodgeball (a Vaughn-led band of misfits triumph over adversity), but this is a mere shadow of those films, painfully lacking in laughs or any characters that leave a lasting impression. The True Detective-inspired Vaughnaissance can't get here fast enough.

Lending support are Tom Wilkinson as a divorced sixtysomething desperate to get his mojo back and Dave Franco as a dimwitted ex-Foot Locker employee whose name, Mike Pancake, becomes an unfunny gag the film returns to again and again. Spare a thought for Sienna Miller, too, who after a pair of impressive dramatic turns in Foxcatcher and American Sniper gets lumbered with a one-note villain role here.

Unfinished Business's misfiring gags are chief among its failings, each one clumsily set up so there's little surprise when the punchline lands. When Vaughn's Dan Trunkman tells Mike not to mention his distracting last name, he will say it out loud. When Mike expresses endless confusion over the wheelbarrow position, this will inevitably result in some on-screen exploration.

Director Ken Scott, who made Vaughn's Delivery Man last year, strives to add in a sentimental streak through Dan's relationship with his bullied son and daughter, but this sits awkwardly next to the raunchier aspects of the film. The trio's exploits at a Berlin sex festival (with Nick Frost's Brit businessman) could've been comedy gold, but instead it falls completely flat, its "glory holing" centrepiece scene dismally unfunny.

The True Detective-inspired Vaughnaissance can't get here fast enough.

Timing is apparently the secret to good comedy, but here the tempo and rhythm is all off - cutaways to character reactions last a fraction too long resulting in jokes that hopelessly flounder. It all feels like a haphazardly assembled collection of disjointed skits that just haven't been fine-tuned in script, direction or the editing room.

Unfinished Business clearly wants to meld Office Space's wry workplace humour and The Hangover's bawdy sensibility, but in the end it succeeds at neither. The worst thing about it is it's not bad enough to get really riled up and angry about. It just passes you by, barely raising a snigger and making you pine for Vaughn comedies from a decade ago.

Simon Reynolds

Movies Editor 

Simon has worked as a journalist for more than a decade, writing on staff and freelance for Hearst, Dennis, Future and Autovia titles before joining Cision in 2022.