Delivery Man

I can see what Vince Vaughn is trying to do with his performance in Delivery Man.  He's trying to dial down his trademark motormouth comic delivery, hoping to come across as being a bit more likable and less abrasive than he sometimes can be.  Where the performance goes wrong, I think, is that he dials it back a little too much.  He seems worn out and kind of deflated.  Or maybe he just had a sinking feeling that the film he was stuck in just wasn't working out.  Whatever the case, Vaughn's performance seems kind of downbeat, and it kills the energy of the film.

Delivery Man is a soppy little comedy-drama that fails at both of the genres it aims for.  It has no real laughs, and the dramatic moments are manipulative and soggy in their sentimentality.  It is a remake of the French-Canadian film, Starbuck, which I have not seen, but remember reading good things about.  Both the original film and the Hollywood remake share the same writer and director, Ken Scott.  Given the praise I have read for Starbuck, I can only guess that something got lost in Scott's own adaptation.  In the film, Vaughn plays David Wozniak, a 40-something slacker who is in debt in both unpaid parking tickets, and to some criminals that he apparently owes around $80,000 to. (A plot point that is established early on, and brought up now and then, but holds no real impact on the story oddly enough.) To add to his financial problems, David's girlfriend (Cobie Smulders) has just announced that she is pregnant, yet feels that David is not financially responsible enough to be a father or a husband. 

David strives to prove her wrong and "get a life", as he puts it, but it's about this time that he gets a visit from a lawyer with some shocking news.  It seems that 20 years ago, David sold his sperm to a fertility clinic a grand total of 633 times over a period of three years.  The end result is that he now has 533 children created from his sperm, and some of those kids are suing in order to find out the identity of their biological father.  In the process of hiring his best friend, Brett (Chris Pratt), to act as his lawyer in the upcoming trial, David starts to become curious about who these people are who want to know his identity, and starts flipping through their profiles.  He becomes so intrigued that he actually starts seeking these people out, and helping them out in their everyday lives, either as a kindly stranger, or an anonymous good samaritan.  This brings about a lot of contrived and forced sentimental moments where David starts to care about something other than himself for the first time.

I think the idea behind Delivery Man could work, but the script is so heavy with its drama, and none of the jokes hit, so the movie never takes off.  It also desperately wants to be a feel-good crowd pleaser, so it piles on the schmaltz in such heavy doses, I started to feel assaulted as the film wore on.  This is a movie that has its heart in the right place, but the brain is completely absent.  The screenplay by Ken Scott is clumsy in the way it sets up these scenarios where David meets his own children under hidden pretenses.  Some of the scenarios don't even make that much sense.  In one instance, he tracks down one of his kids - a woman whom he sees through an open window of her apartment building is having an angry phone call with somebody.  Wanting to find out what's wrong, he decides to disguise himself as a pizza delivery guy so he can get inside her apartment.  How did he know she had ordered a pizza in the first place, though?  Lucky thing he got in, however, as he is able to save her life when she has a drug overdose, and helps her keep her job at the department store she works at.

There is also a very odd subplot concerning one of David's kids named Viggo (Adam Chanler-Berat), who finds out that David is his biological father, and offers not to tell the other kids if he will let him stay in David's apartment.  The movie seems unsure what to do with this character, as once he's introduced, it forgets to give David and Viggo a real relationship, nor do they spend a lot of time together.  The fact that the two share a supposedly heart-warming scene near the end is obviously supposed to imply that these two characters have grown close with one another, but it never comes across at any point in the film.  Not only is the introduction of Viggo unnecessary, but the character doesn't generate any laughs to begin with. 

Then again, I'm hard pressed to remember any real laughs during Delivery Man.  I think I might have smiled once, and that's being generous.  It seems that with each passing film, Vince Vaughn gets further from the success he once enjoyed.  With this film, he almost seems to have given up, which might explain his sadsack portrayal of his character.

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