“The Delivery Man,” starring Vince Vaughn, is virtually a
scene-by-scene, shot-for-shot clone of director Ken Scott’s 2011
French-Canadian comedy Starbuck, with
only the language (English rather than French) and location (Brooklyn rather
than Montreal) changed. Now you might wonder why Scott, who directs this
remake, would not want to revise all of the plot problems with the original
script. Unfortunately, he doesn’t and the movie suffers. David Wozniak is a
congenial screw-up, going nowhere in his life. He learns that as a young man,
his rampant sperm donations (all for a noble cause, revealed late in the
picture) let to 533 women being impregnated. What’s more, over a 142 of David’s
offspring are suing the errant sperm bank to learn David’s identity. The rest
of the movie follows David as he anonymously gets to know some of his adult
children. Each sketchy episode is designed to make us care for the man-child
slacker. He saves one daughter from drug addiction. He helps a son realize his
dream of an acting career.
David has no defining traits other than a loving heart and
Vaughn plays him with a surprising lack of energy. Chris Pratt as David’s
lawyer friend and Cobie Smulders as David’s put-upon girlfriend do their best
to finesse the material. But a lot of the supposed humor just isn’t there. And
a subplot involving David’s debt to mob thugs is dropped in, seemingly at
random, and then easily dispatched. And, like the original, you never hear
anything about the mothers who gave birth to these hundreds of kids nor their
fathers. Scott is doing everything he can to wring an emotional response from
the audience; he even resorts to a group hug at the end. Since I saw Starbuck, “The Delivery Man” was too much been there, seen that. 11/22/13
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