Originally published March 8, 2015 on FrontRowCentral.com
Unfinished Business is a terrible comedy from top to bottom. Its every twist and turn is designed to tug at the reptilian parts of your brain that enjoy being told how to feel and when to laugh. Then, when your defenses are lowered, the film coldcocks you with gratuitous nudity and hateful, pompous screeds about the definitions of art and manliness. As much as it pains me to admit this, no mere review can fully explain this film’s special brand of torture. You simply have to experience Unfinished Business for yourself, though I certainly would never recommend that.
Dan Truckman (Vince Vaughn) has just quit his job as a mineral salesman, because his boss, Chuck (Sienna Miller), cut his pay by five percent. Dan then immediately decides to open a firm of his own with Tim (Tom Wilkinson), who just got laid off, and Mike (Dave Franco), who just failed an interview for being the dimmest bulb on the planet. Together, Apex Systems must travel to Portland, Maine to sign new potential clients Jim (James Marsden) and Bill (Nick Frost). When Chuck swoops in to steal their thunder, the whole gang jets off to Berlin to decide who gets to seal the deal, because this movie had a budget, and by god, they were going to spend it someplace fancy.
Of course, there’s plenty of room in “three schlubbos go on a business trip” for a handful of good jokes. Certainly with Dave Franco and Nick Frost in the mix, you’d think this movie might deliver at least a hearty chuckle here and there. At every turn, though, the film makes calculated decisions that cut the legs out from under anything even remotely humorous. Take Franco’s character, for example. Mike is a grade-A dummy, which would have been fine, but Franco mumbles and stutters every line, making it an absolute chore just to hear him talk. Then, Mike admits that he’s mentally handicapped and lives in a group home, and suddenly Mike’s quirks stop being funny. Suddenly, everything Mike says and does comes with a side order of pity. That’s when the film pivots and starts making fun of Mike’s last name, Pancake, because it realizes that it just shot itself in the foot by making one of its characters mentally deficient.
“Pancake” honestly feels like a placeholder joke that someone left in the movie when they couldn’t think of a better silly name. Placeholders like that are everywhere in this film. “Mineral sales” sounds like something a child would make up because they don’t actually know what their father does for a living. This would almost be thematically appropriate, as the film’s sole framing device involves Dan talking to himself in narration about his daughter’s school assignment titled “Who’s Your Daddy?” He has a hard time explaining to himself who he is, partly because his is a job of zero consequence. He specifically deals in swarf, waste material leftover from metalwork, but I don’t buy that Dan’s entire life revolves around metal shavings. He could be in the business of fart subsidies for all I care. The way Vaughn plays him, Dan is all about the money. It’s not particularly important where he gets his swarf or to whom he’s trying to sell it; what’s important is that screenwriter Steve Conrad wrote Dan as a man who literally sells garbage and is more than happy to do it.
Then, because this movie hasn’t yet exhausted its reserves of Vaughnian hubris, Mike books Dan a hotel room that turns out to be an art exhibit called “American Businessman 42.” It’s an actual hotel room housed inside a modern art museum, where spectators can walk up and watch Mike go about his business, take off his pants, watch TV, you name it. Vince Vaughn is officially on display as an art piece, but when he can’t pay for the room partway through his stay (because I guess he was paying night to night), the museum kicks him out. He then replies, “You can’t kick me out! I’m art!” No, Vince. I’m sorry, but you’re not. You’re nothing but a tour guide through this hellscape of Euro-oddities.
Actually, if I have to compare Unfinished Business to a work of art, I would compare it to Dante’s “Inferno.” (Put that on the DVD.) This movie is an unholy jaunt across the fathoms of Hell, and Vince Vaughn is our Virgil, shepherding us through endless naked butt cheeks and fields of ravers dancing their way through the sludge of human misery. We arrive at the circle of fornicators and discover Dave Franco shaking hands with a dick sticking out of a gloryhole. We descend further into the third circle of gluttony to find Tom Wilkinson taking a bunch of ecstasy and doing kegstands at a youth hostel. Then, at the center of it all is ice queen Sienna Miller repeatedly chewing Vince Vaughn’s face off for his betrayal at the start of the film.
The only way out of this quagmire is to soldier through, and before we reach the end we’re subjected to a subplot in which Dan constantly videochats with his wife and kids back home. This is supposed to illustrate the tough reality of a father constantly away on business, but it’s hard to take it seriously when Dan’s lessons of fatherhood are couched in so many awkwardly staged sex jokes and strange assertions about the nature of art. Unfinished Business is a cacophony of elements that should never have been mashed together, and not even Vince Vaughn’s obsession with himself is enough salvage it.
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