Movie Review #226: "Unfinished Business" (2015)

Movie: "Unfinished Business"
Ticket Price: $12.50
Director: Ken Scott
Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

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Dan Trunkman (Vince Vaughn) is tired of working for a company that doesn't appreciate him. Dan decides to quit his job at Dynamic and start his own competing company called Apex. He hires on Timothy McWinters (Tom Wilkinson), who was fired by Dynamic for being too old, and young former Footlocker employee named Mike Pancake (Dave Franco), who was applying for a job at Dynamic the day Dan quit. A year later, Apex is struggling to stay in business, but is about to close the deal that will save their company for good. All Dan must do is fly to Portland to "shake" on it, but when his team arrives in Maine, he finds his old Dynamic boss, Chuck (Sienna Miller), is there competing for the same deal. After the deal isn't closed in Portland, the team must fly to Germany and meet with the head of the company in an attempt to get it done.

"Unfinished Business" is an obvious attempt at an R-rated do-over of 2013's PG-13 once-a-year-is-as-much-as-we-can-handle-him-because-we're-over-him Vince Vaughn movie called "The Internship," which was your basic middle of the road comedy and huge advertisement for Google. This time around, "Unfinished Business" is 2015's much raunchier misfit faux inspirational salesperson movie, and only this time, Dunkin' Donuts is the product being hawked in the background, but we're still pretty much over Vince Vaughn. He plays a smooth talking salesman type with a heart because, what else would he play? This is the same exact part Vaughn has played in every movie he has been in since "Swingers," and that was in 1996, folks. This movie features the same underdog story about the small business man battling the big, cold corporate monster we have all seen time and time again. Vaughn is joined by Dave Franco, who plays the naive and really mentally challenged Mike Pancake. Yes, you read that right, Mike Pancake. His name was not a surprise to us since this joke was featured in the trailer. The "ha-ha, his last name is a breakfast food" is one of the major running jokes in this film, most of which are shown in said trailer. We mentioned that Mike Pancake is mentally challenged, and we, unfortunately, mean it. At first, filmmakers lead the audience to believe that Mike is simply just an idiot and is so dumb that he doesn't know what some simple words are or how to pronounce them, or the difference between a square and a rectangle. Upon closer examination of his character as the movie drudges on, we find out that his character has a legitimate learning disability and lives in a group home, presumably for the mentally handicapped, though it is never explicitly said. The fact that he is more than a young, naive kid who is ignorant to the world and is actually disabled kind of rips the joke right out of the character and into extremely sensitive and offensive territory. It's one thing to make a character a bumbling idiot, but it's quite another to make him have a disability. As we've mentioned before on this blog, we can take a lot of bad humor, but mocking the disabled is not one of the subjects that's ever funny to us. Once the film mentions this about his character, it destroys any and all humor surrounding him and as a double-whammy, makes us feel like complete jerks for laughing at him when we thought he was just a nitwit simpleton. The third person in this ragtag trio is Tom Wilkinson, only this time, instead of the suave, sophisticated gentleman he typically plays in, you know, good and respectable movies, he is a foulmouthed, sex-crazed maniac of an old man name Timothy McWinters, which is funny because old people cursing, drinking, doing drugs and liking sex to forget their shitty life is funny......right? In an effort to give his character a reason to be this way, filmmakers tack on a random plot point about how Timothy is unhappy in his marriage and has never made actually love before because he doesn't truly love his wife. The entire reason Wilkinson was hired is so he could be the odd man out, but it sort of backfires on him because instead of being funny, Wilkinson truly feels out of place walking around the streets of Germany with the other two guys that we almost feel bad that his career has come to this point. There's no possible way he thought this movie would make him tons of money, right? The three travel across the world to make one giant dick joke of a movie. There are some laughs in the film mainly driven by the awkward moments where Vaughn is forced to hold a conversation with a fully nude business partner at a spa while Franco and Wilkinson snicker at butts and boobs while literally saying "butt crack" and "big boobies" out loud. Or, when Vaughn has an awkward encounter in the bathroom of a German gay bar where he happens to find his would-be client on the other side of a glory hole and is then forced to go over his business numbers while his client and a few other men hang their penises out of holes in full view of anyone and everyone.

Though the little guy start-up company versus big guy corporate machine scenario along with a dozen plane, car and train rides plus wild partying on a business trip should be enough to drive this film on its own, filmmakers apparently thought there needed to be more heart inserted somewhere into its very short run time, so they added some tacked on and completely arbitrarily misplaced subplot about Vince Vaughn's family life and how his kids were being bullied at school and on social media. Though this plot point was obviously well meaning, it just seems so random and out of place, and that's really how most of this movie feels. There is a real lack of continuity throughout the film as it seems filmmakers wrote tons of ideas and jokes down on scratch paper and then wrote a story to fit around those jokes and random thoughts. It is all over the map and not in a good way. What should be a funny enough film instead becomes a rather boring movie about competition between businesses where the audience is left waiting much too long between bad, flat jokes. It will be a movie you will forget even existed in an hour and is pretty much a piece of crap that is light on business and heavy on penis jokes and traveling. It uses disabilities and glory holes as humor while a tired Vince Vaughn stands in the same place he has been since 1996, and that is one of the lowest rungs on the comedy ladder.

My Rating: 3.5/10
BigJ's Rating: 4.5/10
IMDB's Rating: 5.1/10
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 13%
Do we recommend this movie: No.
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One year ago, we were watching: "The Breakfast Club"