Unfinished Business (MA) ★★
Selected release (91 minutes)
Reviewed by Philippa Hawker
Ken Scott's Unfinished Business is an odd, clunky male-bonding comedy about ambition, competition and letting go. It feels as if it has been written by a committee of 18 who had only a vague idea of the plot but were asked to contribute a scene each.
Vince Vaughn is Dan, a sales guy who quits his company job in righteous fury to start his own business. He takes with him two unlikely recruits: a cranky old guy, Timothy (Tom Wilkinson), and a total naif, Mike (Dave Franco). The latter's surname is Pancake, and the gales of laughter that this provokes becomes one of the movie's more bewildering attempts at a running gag.
A year later, their office is still a Dunkin' Donuts, and things have got to crisis point when they are compelled to go to Berlin to pitch for an account to save their jobs. They'll also be competing against Dan's brutal former boss and nemesis (Sienna Miller, who once again deserves a better movie).
Why Berlin? There are a few fish-out-of-water comic possibilities in an overseas location, and the possibilities for heartstring-tugging in the development of family problems back home that Dan is unable to deal with from afar. There are also events such as a marathon, a gay sex fair and a G8 summit that can be inserted clumsily into the narrative, alongside set-ups involving Timothy's attempts to find sexual release and Mike's desire to lose his virginity.
There are glimmerings of an idea in the figure of the good-natured Dan, and Vaughn does his best to make him appealing. But the movie is thrown together around him in a blundering half-hearted fashion. It seems to have been designed as a family guy's workplace comedy on tour with the boys, a kind of EuroBusinessTrip with a heart: it fails dismally on all counts,
