At one point in “Delivery Man,” a remake of the much-loved French film “Starbuck,” David Wozniak’s (Vince Vaughn) father (Andrzej Blumenfeld) says, “If you can live with his countless faults you’ll have some marvelous times.”
David is a sweet tempered, kind oaf who never seems to make the right decision. That’s a fault that has landed him $80,000 in debt, desperate for cash and, as if that wasn’t enough, he’s also the biological father of over 500 children. To say he brings some baggage with his good nature is an understatement along the lines of calling Miley Cyrus show-offy.
Vaughn subs in for French star Patrick Huard in this almost shot-for-shot remake of the original film. He’s a man-child who, “everyday finds new ways to push the limits of incompetence,” but learns commitment and responsibility after discovering that his sperm bank donations unwittingly made him the father of 533 children, 142 of whom have filed a class action lawsuit to learn their biological father’s real identity.
“Delivery Man” features a much more low key Vaughn than we’ve seen lately, and that’s a good thing. His slick motor mouth act got tired around the same time the housing bubble burst but with very few exceptions—Into the Wild being one of them—he’s been coasting through movies like “Fred Claus,” “Couple’s Retreat” and (worst of all) “The Watch.”
But he’s not a one trick pony and “Delivery Man” reminds us that there is more to him than verbal dexterity and sardonic wit.
He hands in a charming performance with all the rough edges buffed away in a movie that is unabashedly sweet—some might say corny—but there is no cynicism here and that is the movie’s main strength.
In a recent tweet-a-thon to promote Delivery Man Cobie Smulders teased that people should go see the film because Chris Pratt gets naked.
“He doesn’t get naked,” she says a week later, admitting to the fib.
“That was very overwhelming. I had never done that before. There were 9000 tweets and I didn’t know what to do. It was crazy. I was trying to write and my phone was (shaking).”
The Canadian-born How I Met Your Mother actress stars opposite Vince Vaughn in a remake of Starbuck, a popular French-Canadian film about a man who finds personal redemption when he learns he is the father of 533 children.
“I went into watching Starbuck and then reading this script, like, ‘533 kids… from a sperm donor! What’s this going to be?’
“It’s still super funny, but I found myself affected by the way he connected with the children. The way they connected as human beings. Going out and doing a good deed and having it affect somebody in a positive way. I’ve always believed when you do good, you get good in return. That’s when I feel my best and there are many aspects of that in this film.”
The sweet, uplifting message of Delivery Man struck a chord with Smulders who says she “related to it on a parental level. I’m a mom myself and I think it touched upon so many themes of family and of being a parent.”
The story has also resonated with audiences.
The original film was 2011’s most successful homegrown film in Quebec. Smulders thinks the appeal of this very specific story has to do with its universality.
“It’s a blown up version of something that happens in real life,” she says. “You had a relationship when you were younger and all of a sudden a woman contacts the father and, ‘Oh, by the way, you have a seven year old.’ Obviously there is room for comedy there but everyone wants him to step up and be the hero and watch him do that journey.”
“We were so lucky to have [original director] Ken Scott. He did it so well the first time that he was able to do it a second time and have those same sentiments in it and spoken in English.”
Now there’s even talk of a Bollywood remake.
“We should have done a Bollywood song and dance at the end of our movie,” Smulders laughs.
The success of movies like The Bells of St Mary’s and A Christmas Carol triggered an avalanche of Yuletide themed movies from producers eager to cash in on the spirit of the season. Every year a new one comes out and for every hit there are a Santa’s sack of stinkers like Jingle All the Way and Surviving Christmas. This year’s entry is Four Christmases, the story of two smarmy yuppies played by Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon who lie to their families—“You can’t spell families without ‘lies,’” Vaughn says—to get out of spending quality time with their siblings and parents over the holidays. When they get caught in the lie they must spend four Christmases, one with each of their divorced parents.
Every year Brad (Vaughn) and Kate (Witherspoon) sidestep family obligations at Christmas with a series of well crafted lies. They usually tell the folks they have volunteered to do charity work in third world countries but instead take off for the sunny climes of Fiji or some other exotic vacation spot. When their flight gets cancelled and they end up on the news the jig is up—they’ve been busted and have to make the rounds visiting their families. There’s Brad’s crusty old father (Robert Duvall) and his Ultimate Fighter brothers (Jon Favreau and Tim McGraw), Kate’s mother (Mary Steenburgen) and nymphomaniac aunts and grandmother, Brad’s free-loving hippie mother (Sissy Spacek) and Kate’s sensitive but aloof father (Jon Voight). Of course by the end, despite their families foibles, they realize that there is nothing more important than family.
Four Christmases tries for the tricky balance between comedy and heart-warming and almost succeeds. In its first hour it mostly goes for laughs, using Vaughn’s fast-talking jive, slap stick and some outrageous characters to keep the needle on the laugh-o-meter clicking into the red. Sprinkled throughout the four family tour are some good moments and funny situations and some sequences that strain to find the joke which is pretty much on par with an average mainstream comedy not written by Seth Rogen.
Then in the last thirty minutes it’s as if someone flicked off the funny switch and the tone suddenly shifts into heart-warming and it’s here that the movie earns a big lump of coal. The edge of the past sixty-minutes evaporates and all of a sudden we’re watching a TV movie of the week about family values. Reese Witherspoon can pull this off. She’s likeable, emanating a warm fuzzy glow when she’s on-screen. Vaughn can’t. His inborn edginess works well in something like the R-rated Wedding Crashers but falls very flat in family fare; ditto his patented mile-a-minute patter. In fact, his two funniest scenes—both mush mouthed television appearances—work because he finally drops the smart-Alec rapping.
When the movie turns mushy you have to care about the characters in order to care about their love lives, and Vaughn’s lack of warmth works against him here. You’ll see the “family is everything” message coming a mile away; the trouble is by the time it hits you may not care.
Four Christmases isn’t a truly bad movie, just a really predictable one.
The success of the 1966 cartoon The Grinch Who Stole Christmas triggered an avalanche of Yuletide themed movies from producers eager to cash in on the spirit of the season. Every year a new one comes out and for every hit there are a Santa’s sack of stinkers like Jingle All the Way and Surviving Christmas.
A year ago a new teaser trailer appeared in theatres to whet people’s appetite for a movie called Fred Claus. It was a lighthearted, fun clip featuring Fred (Vince Vaughn) and his brother Santa (Paul Giamatti) playfully yukking it up for the camera. It was a funny, warm scene that helped drive memories of the odious Christmas with the Krumps from the section of my brain that catalogues Xmas movies.
The casting of these two unlikely actors playing brothers seemed inspired and the supporting cast included no fewer than four Oscar nominees or winners. It seemed like a winner. Unfortunately, like so many previous failed holiday themed movies Fred Claus is naughtier than nice. It’s as though The Grinch, not satisfied with stealing Christmas from Whoville, swooped down on this movie and stole all the humor.
Vaughn, playing the title role, reprises his usual fast talking character—he’s part charmer, part con man who dreams of opening his own business, an OTB Parlor. Trouble is, he’s $50,000 short of the start-up money, so to raise money he dons a Santa hat, creates a fake charity and hits the pavement, silver bell and donation bucket in hand. After a dust-up with some other sidewalk Santas he winds up in jail with only one option for bail—his brother.
Fred has been estranged from his sibling (he’s an independent Claus or perhaps even Claustrofobic) ever since Nick cut down his favorite pine to make the first-ever Christmas tree. Wouldn’t that make them hundreds of years old, you ask? Why yes, apparently when Nick was made a Saint his entire family was frozen in time—they never age. Since then Fred has been living under the shadow of his younger brother.
St. Nick not only antes up the bail, but agrees to loan Fred the $50,000 he needs to open the OTB if he comes to the North Pole and works for the cash. Of course Fred agrees, and during his trip to Santa’s home turf befriends a lovesick elf (suffering from low elf esteem no doubt), and throws the whole operation into chaos to the point where Christmas is almost cancelled. By the end of the movie, however, everyone has learned valuable lessons about the importance of family, co-operation and acceptance.
Fred Claus earns a big lump of coal in almost every department. I don’t know what happened between the time the teaser trailer hit the multiplex and the film was released, but all the charm captured in that one scene we saw a year ago—which isn’t in the movie by the way—has been sucked out of the final product. Even the film’s funniest scene, a Siblings Anonymous meeting with cameos by Frank Stallone, Roger Clinton and Stephen Baldwin is poorly paced and not as effective as it could be.
The problems start from the top down. Vaughn’s inborn edginess works well in something like the R-rated Wedding Crashers but falls very flat in family fare; ditto his patented mile-a-minute patter. Director David Dobkin uses Vaughn’s size—he’s 6′ 5″—to good effect, however, taking every opportunity to hang the actor’s long legs over the edge of the tiny elf beds, but apart from some of the physical comedy Vaughn seems to be on auto pilot.
Co-lead Giamatti, tries hard but doesn’t fare much better than Vaughn. Crammed into a Santa suit (with disturbingly swollen hands) he resembles an overstuffed Christmas goose. It’s a shame; Giamatti is a great actor capable of much, much more than this. I wonder if his acting teachers at Yale ever imagined him delivering the line, “Ho, ho ho! I’m not gonna listen to no!”
Fred Claus uses the worst kind of manipulative holiday motifs to try and force the audience to care about these cardboard characters. There’s the orphaned young boy searching for a family, the bad-boy looking for redemption and the grinchy businessman. These stereotypes are the staple of every Yuletide story from A Christmas Carol on up and can be effective, it’s just too bad they weren’t put to better use here. Fred Claus exactly the nightmare before Christmas, but if you spend your money on this one, yule be sorry.
“The Internship,” the story of two old guys who try to get jobs at Google, is the funniest infomercial I’ve ever seen. As a comedy movie it doesn’t rate that high, but as an advertisement for Google it’s a knee slapper.
I’ve seen product placement in movies before, but this is something else. By the time Rose Byrnes’ character says, “I believe what we do here makes people’s lives better,” I was ready to worship at the Church of the Sacred Search Engine.
We also learn that Google is ranked as the best place to work in America.
That’s all great, but I was hoping for more laughs with my infomercial.
This new buddy comedy pairs Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn for the first time since 2005’s “Wedding Crashers.” They are Nick and Billy, two wild and crazy guys whose sales jobs are made obsolete in the technological age. Unable to get a foothold in the new media field they crash Google’s Mountain View, California headquarters and become “noogles” in hopes of landing gigs as interns, despite having no experience with computers. “We’re looking at some sort of mental Hunger Games against a bunch of genius kids for just a handful of jobs,” says Nick.
There are some laughs in “The Internship.” Unfortunately very few of them are generated by the over-the-title-stars, Vaughn and Wilson. The chemistry that made “Wedding Crashers” such a big hit eight years ago is still in place, but the material isn’t. They still banter a blue streak—one of the characters says, “you’re saying a lot of words that mean nothing,” and she hits it right on the head—but it feels tired and old, like many of the jokes.
The fish-out-of-water idea—two luddites at a tech mecca—should have been workable, but it often feels like laughing at grandpa because he can’t figure out how to work the remote. It’s a bit too easy.
Add to that Nick and Billy—or Nick, Nicky, Nickelodeon and Bill, Willie, Billiard as those crazy kids slangily call one another—being heroes for teaching the overachieving kids about life by getting them drunk and taking them to a strip club, and you have a “Revenge of the Nerds” with a dollop of “Jersey Shore” thrown in—and the two mix about as well as you might imagine.
The situations, while predictable and often stretched a bit thin, do allow several of the other cast members to shine. As Yoyo, the anxious overachiever Tobit Raphael earns a few laughs and as the nerdy NehaTiya Sircargets a couple of good lines in, as do others, but overall it isn’t a laugh riot.
“The Internship” overdoes it with the Googliness and easy sentiment, and underdoes it with the jokes. Perhaps next time the screenwriterscan Google some better gags.
In “The Dilemma,” the latest from director Ron Howard, Vince Vaughn and Kevin James star as car designers trying create a new, sporty hybrid automobile. It’s a fitting job for them as the movie is kind of a hybrid itself, two parts screwball comedy to one part drama.
Vaughn and James are Ronny and Nick, best friends and business partners who relate to one another mostly by speaking in football metaphors. By day they work together, creating a new hybrid car for Dodge; at night (in the beginning of the movie anyway) they and their significant others, girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Connelly) and wife Geneva (Winona Ryder), hang out, tight as peas in a pod. Everything changes one day, however, when Ronny sees Geneva kissing another man, the muscle-bound stud Zip (Channing Tatum). Enter the dilemma. Does he tell his best friend that his wife is having an affair and risk ruining their marriage and adding stress to Nick’s life when they are on the cusp of the biggest business deal of their careers?
At the heart of “The Dilemma” is Vince Vaughn, once the charming actor of “Swingers” and a series of comedies like “Wedding Crashers,” now a one-trick-pony who relies a bit too heavily on his uncanny ability to string together long uninterrupted phrases of hip back talk. It was funny in 2005, amusing in 2007 and has now worn out its welcome. What happened to the actor capable of interesting work in movies like “Into the Wild”? He’s become guilty of recycling the same character from movie to movie with only small variations.
Here he plays a self-centered meddler who sticks his nose where it doesn’t belong. Sure there are a few laughs — and only a few — along the way, but they come with a been-there-done-that feeling of déjà Vaughn.
Otherwise it’s an adult sit-com whose idea of humor is to have the stocky Kevin James deliver lines like, “Love can be very filling, like a warm stew.” The serious stuff, and there’s more than you would expect in a movie marketed as a comedy, doesn’t really ring true, but at least Jennifer Connelly brings an air of authenticity to the relationship end of her story.
Most of “The Dilemma’s” best moments are in the trailer, a two-minute synopsis of the story, which benefits from the lack of Vaughn’s motor-mouth riffing. Come to think of it, the entire movie could have benefitted from less Vaughn and more jokes.
Wedding Crashers is a comedy of manners—bad manners that is. Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn make their living as smooth talking mediators in difficult divorce cases. The side effect of this is that they are really good at talking malarkey to get people to do what they want—especially women. This dovetails nicely with their sideline of crashing weddings and using their charm to score food, drinks and bridesmaids who they say “throw their inhibitions to the wind” at marriage ceremonies. For these guys wedding crashing is more than just a hobby, it is a way of life with a strict set of rules, one of which says that they must never fall in love with any of their conquests. Of course, both break the rule—Vaughn hooks up with the slightly psychotic daughter of a well connected politician and Wilson with her beautiful sister, played by Canadian Rachel McAdams. Much of the success of Wedding Crashers is due to the chemistry between Vaughn and Wilson, who keep things cruising along at a good clip with snappy dialogue—much of which seems improvised—and their considerable charms. Neither are stretching as actors here—we’ve seen Vaughn’s manic motor mouth routine in a few films recently, and Wilson isn’t displaying any of the acting muscle he did in The Royal Tenenbaums—but audiences won’t care because although the film has some pacing problems, little comic momentum and is fairly predictable, but it does have enough funny lines to be enjoyable.
The guys from “Swingers” have finally grown up. Thirteen years after their break out hit Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau are teamed up again but this time around the zoot suits have been left in storage and the hipster lingo is a thing of the past. In “Couples Retreat” (sic) the boys are old hipsters with wives, kids, martial dysfunction and a group of friends teetering on the cusp of major mid life crisis. They’re no longer “money,” to use the “Swingers” lingo, but they’re in for some major change.
The story focuses on four couples Dave and Ronnie (Vince Vaughn and Malin Akerman), Shane and Trudy (Faizon Love and Kali Hawk), Jason and Cynthia (Jason Bateman and Kristen Bell), and Joey and Lucy (Jon Favreau and Kristin Davis) who go to an island resort called Eden West. This isn’t Sandals or Hedonism, however, couples at Eden West are expected to follow a rigorous relationship building course, that is equal parts Tai Chi, couples therapy and Art of War, taught by Marcel (Jean Reno). Participation is not optional, and of course, each of the couples learns something new about themselves and their bond.
“Couples Retreat” annoyed me for many reasons. First off, when did it become OK for Hollywood to completely ignore the lowly apostrophe? The title should be “Couple’s Retreat,” but apparently no one at Universal (or Vaughn or Favreau) owns a copy of “The Elements of Style.” Punctuation, however, is just the beginning of the problems with “Couple Retreat.”
The movie starts promisingly. The cast is likeable enough—Vaughn, Favreau, Jason Bateman, Faison Love, Malin Ackerman and the two Kristens, Davis and Bell—and the opening half-an-hour pleases in a low-fi way. As a set up to the main action—the trip to the Bora Bora—we’re treated to a mostly well written and interesting introduction to the characters. And Vaughn and Ackerman’s youngest son is hilarious. As I say, it’s mostly good stuff that sets up the relationship comedy that is to follow, except that once they hit the island at 40ish minute mark the movie slows to a slow grind. A grating slow grind.
What is it about comedies set on islands Remember “Club Paradise”? “Club Dread”? Sunshine and sky blue water seem to be comedy killers (except for “Gilligan’s Island” of course!). It’s certainly the case here. The post island scenes are only intermittently amusing, slowed by therapy scenes that don’t deliver big laughs and predictable relationship “development” that should be heartfelt but feels forced.
High points include Carlos Ponce as the randy yoga instructor Salvadore and the scenes with the kids that bookend the film. Low points include every minute the usually reliable Jean Reno is on screen and the beyond shameless product placement for Applebee’s and Guitar Hero.
“Couples Retreat” feels like a movie of missed opportunities. It’s not funny enough to be called a comedy and when the best relationship advice on offer is about finding the right person to take to Applebee’s, it can’t be called insightful either.
Everyone knows Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau are BFFs. They’ve co-starred in a number of movies and when they aren’t sharing the screen they’re sharing producing and writing credits.
They are to Hollywood what toast and jam is to breakfast. That is to say, it’s almost unthinkable to have one without the other. But just as peanut butter can spice up any slice of toast and jam, the Vaughn/Favreau recipe for success has a third secret ingredient.
The name may not ring a bell, but say the phrase “You’ll shoot your eye out,” and suddenly the image of the blonde youngster with oversized glasses and a Christmas wish for a Red Ryder BB gun comes to mind.
His portrayal of Ralphie in A Christmas Story is a classic; but that was 1983 and this is now. He’s all grown up and after making over 100 commercials and countless after-school specials he’s now a big time producer and director, most often working as the third leg of Vince and Jon’s tripod.
He produced Iron Man, Zathura and others with Favreau, and The Break Up and Wild West Comedy Show with Vaughn. This weekend he steps behind the camera to direct his two pals in Couples Retreat.
He hasn’t, however, completely from acting. One of the pleasures of the Wild West Comedy show was watching Billingsley and Vaughn re-enact a scene from the after school special The Fourth Man, a hyper-serious drama about a kid who gets hooked on steroids.
But his appearances haven’t been confined to poking fun at his earlier work. In 1993 he starred in an underrated straight-to-video sci fi/horror gem called Arcade (written by Batman’s David S. Goyer) playing a “virtual reality addict” who frees a tormented spirit from a video game. It’s a TRON wannabe, but good b-movie fun nonetheless.
The next year he wrote, directed and starred in the short film The Sacred Fire, a psychological drama about a vampire hunter.
More recently he has confined himself to bit parts in the movies he produces. Catch peeks of him in The Break-Up, Iron Man and Four Christmases.
Billingsley is one of the rare happy endings from Hollywood’s child star system.
“Pete has great ideas and he’s a really balanced, easy, smart and nice guy,” says Vaughn. “He’s really intelligent but really just respectful of people.”
