A long time ago, roughly two years, the French part of Canada made a comedy film called Starbuck that was charming and original and not brilliant but not terrible. As of this month you can now buy an American remake starring Vince Vaughn under the pseudonym ‘Delivery Man’. The film concerns David Wozniak (Vaughn) who has suddenly found out he's the father of 533 twenty-somethings.
To be blunt, this film is terrible. If you can stop your logic circuits for just a second it’s got a sprinkling of charm, but not much more than a sprinkling. David Wozniak has refused to grow up, works for his father’s company and has never progressed or even become particularly good at his job. This is illustrated immediately by him having a parking ticket, and we can judge by his nonchalant manner that he is used to getting parking tickets. Everyone starts talking to him about how he shouldn’t have children, just before he finds out that he is going to have a child and massively in debt.
From here, almost the very beginning, it becomes nothing more than the cinematic version of a one-liner comedy set. Set up/Punch Line. Set up/Punch Line. A practice in predictability, waltzing from terrible plot point to terrible plot point. In true movie fashion, Wozniak comes to terms really quickly with having a child… just moments before a lawyer breaks into his house to inform him he has nearly 600 children from a four year wankfest he had twenty years previously in a sperm bank. Due to a mix up, every fluid ounce of his liquid descendants have been offered to every woman who came into the bank.
Now due to other legal things that they brush over, because they knew that we wouldn’t care a jot, there is a risk that all these people are going to find out he is their dad and come to his house. This worries Wozniak as he assumes they’d ask for money, or want to play monopoly knowing full well he’s lost the wee dog and the top hat, or something… I can’t think of anything properly terrifying right now. His friend, who isn’t played by Seth Rogen but is being played as Seth Rogen, is almost a lawyer and defends him against being outed as the parent of this mass of people.
For some reason Wozniak eventually becomes obsessed with stalking all his children. Now the weird thing, apart from fathering 533 kids, is that he finds them all with ease no matter what they are doing. I assume he has some GPS built into his DNA that means he just knows where they are. He even starts getting involved in their lives, going so far as to convince a young girl not to do heroin anymore, which she does but then goes to work the next day completely fine. I don’t think these people have ever seen Trainspotting to know how unlikely it is that she’d make it to the end of the street.
The film though heavily flawed, is charming in its way and Vaughn is sympathetic as David Wozniak. I would heavily suggest that you do not watch the trailer however because the film doesn’t have a lot of eureka moments and they all show up. Chronologically. Destroying any or suspense tension in the film. There’s a character that rants at length about how he is pissing away his life and it causes him to hate people and want to die pretty much 100% of the time… I don’t think I’m able to empathise anymore than I already do.
If you have someone sexy with a nice bum coming round and you want to kiss them on the face at length while drunkenly ignoring the film you have on, this will be a good one to do it with. But I wouldn’t even accept a free copy of it, even if it was stapled to tickets to some far away country and a thousand pounds in cash…
Okay, yes I would.
Delivery Man gets 2/5
[★★☆☆☆]
Dave Roberts
Delivery Man at CeX
