In Twenty 20-Fav, we’re spending 2025 examining the work of actor/director Jon Favreau. This week we discuss a milestone as Favreau takes his first spin in the director’s chair with Made.
From day one, the marketing around Made insisted that, while it wasn’t literally a sequel to Swingers, it was basically a sequel to Swingers. After all, the film reunites Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau, this time with Favreau writing and directing, and features the same kind of fast-talking bro-bullshit patter that made Swingers one of the big hits of the 90s indie scene. And the film marks a very clear turning point in Favreau’s career. Not only is this his first time in the director’s chair, it’s his first film since Swingers as a producer. It also finds him reuniting with co-stars from multiple previous features, as well as teaming up with producers who will soon be regulars in this column. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Made hit theaters July 13, 2001, just a week after the premiere of Favreau’s IFC talk series Dinner for Five, in which he gathered various filmmakers and actors around a dinner table to shoot the breeze and discuss their craft. Taken together, the two would prove to be a turning point in Favreau’s career. Not content to simply tell his own stories, Favs reinvented himself as a pillar of the community; a charming, genial character who also just happened to be an industry player with the connections to make it all happen. This is a move that will soon pay off in spades, but for now our boy’s gotta keep playing the game. And with Made, he’s taking a bold step.
Harkening back to Rocky Marciano, Made opens in a boxing ring as we find lifelong friends Bobby (Favreau) and Ricky (Vince Fucking Vaughn) duking it out for a modest crowd in Los Angeles. If we didn’t know better, we’d think these were Mike and Trent from Swingers, still at the grind trying to make it by any means necessary. And that’s basically what Bobby and Ricky are. By day an amateur boxer/construction worker, by night a manager to his stripper girlfriend Jessica (Love & Sex‘s Famke Janssen), Bobby gets in deep shit one night when he punches out a bachelor party1 guest who gets too handsy with his girl.
Bobby’s boss, smalltime mafia guy Maxie (Peter Falk), gives Bobby a chance to make amends by doing a job in New York City. He convinces Maxie to let him bring Ricky along, and the two jet off to the Big Apple to meet with Maxie’s east coast contact Ruiz (Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs, unfortunately) to help hand off some money between Ruiz and a man known only as The Welshman (David O’Hara). Bobby takes this job seriously, hellbent on following Maxie’s rules to the letter. Ricky, on the other hand, has ideas about how guys like this oughta behave, projecting confident swagger, throwing money around at hotel clerks (Sam Rockwell) and flight attendants (Jennifer Bransford2). More often than not, this winds up getting them into all kinds of dumb trouble, forcing their limo driver Jimmy (The Sopranos‘ Vincent Pastore) and Ruiz’s right hand Horrace (The Replacements‘ Faizon Love) to bail them out constantly.
Ricky, see, doesn’t have two brain cells to rub together, and thinks the world operates the way it does in the movies. Everyone around him wants him to shut up, but he’s like a bull in a china shop and just can’t help himself. This being a spiritual sequel to Swingers and all, it’s honestly very funny to have the Vaughn character be the one everyone hates. I know everyone loved his balls-out swagger in Swingers, but I’ve always found that persona (the one that’s basically synonymous with Vince Vaughn) to be tiresome, so making that character the butt of all this movie’s jokes is weirdly satisfying.
You can tell Favreau’s grown as a person and as a writer in the years since Swingers. The macho bluster only gets you so far in the world of Made. When Ricky fails to bullshit their way into a nightclub, the bouncer suggests they try another bar down the street. Smash cut to what turns out to be a tea room, with Ricky and Bobby3 hunched over a tiny little table while Bobby tries to very carefully pour tea out of a delicate teapot. It’s very good.
But the way the film undercuts these two clowns (or at the very least Ricky) at every turn, is pretty much what Made is all about. This is Jon Favreau’s version of a mafia movie, and he’s able to mine a lot of awkward comedy out of the guys stuck at the bottom of that totem pole. And to his credit, Vince Vaughn knows how to turn his macho bullshit inside out into something worth laughing at. With his ill-fitting suit and hair done up in a ridiculous pompadour, Ricky is like a parody of Trent from Swingers. Ricky watched Swingers a hundred times and woke up one morning determined to become Trent. As a result, Vaughn spends most of his scenes acting like he’s not even listening to whatever else anyone is saying. He’s lost in his own little world of mafia make believe.
And as a first-time director, Favreau acquits himself well. Made wasn’t designed to be flashy, but he still finds some unique grace notes here and there. The Welshman invites the guys out to the Tavern on the Green restaurant in Central Park to finalize the deal and set a place and time. Afterward, Ricky and Bobby argue at the Central Park Zoo over whether or not Ricky should bring a gun to the handoff. Most of the scene takes place with the penguins in the background, but then we cut to behind the glass, with all the little penguins waddling around in the foreground as Ricky and Bobby have a screaming argument in the background. These dummies in their tough guy mafia suits are no better than the little tuxedoed bastards on display at the zoo.
And, y’know… Turns out I don’t have too terribly much to say about this one. It’s short and sweet, very funny in fits and starts, and feels like a more grown-up kind of hangout movie than the aimless, aggressive tone of Swingers. I liked it. Made‘s a good movie!
THE FAVREAU DIMENSION
I mean, I’ve already covered the big picture stuff. He writes, he directs, he stars… You can see all of Favreau’s hard work finally starting to come together here. He’s proven he can lead a production, and while the movie only barely broke even on a $5 million budget, the connections that he’s made and the work that he’s put into establishing himself in the community will eventually pay off in a big, big way.
Also worth mentioning that Made is Favreau’s first collaboration with co-producer Peter Billingsley (aka Ralphie from A Christmas Story). Billingsley, like Favreau, had been a longtime friend of Vince Vaughn’s, and the three will go on to produce, star, and direct each other in various projects that we’ll definitely be talking about soon.
FINAL RATING
4 stars (out of five). S’good.
NEXT TIME: A film that features none of these people!
- The best man at this bachelor party is inexplicably played by Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello, which now answers a question I’ve always had about Iron Man: How the hell is Tom Morello in Iron Man?
↩︎ - Bransford starred in Smog, a 1999 TV movie (or failed pilot?) written and directed by Jon Favreau. I’d have covered it for this column, but it basically Doesn’t Exist Anymore. Still, it’s nice that he gave her maybe the funniest scene in the film.
↩︎ - Did Will Ferrell name his Talladega Nights character after these two idiots? ↩︎
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