Sunday, December 1, 2013

Delivery Man





Vince Vaughn has remade the jaw-droppingly bad French-Canadian comedy “Starbuck,” about a former sperm donor who has inadvertently fathered 500-some-odd children (so perfectly multicultural they could be a Benetton ad), into an almost equally bad English-language French comedy called “Delivery Man.”


The puerile, scatological Gallic sense of humor survives the translation intact, as does perhaps the least intelligent plot in film history. Vaughn hires his best friend as his lawyer. The dude’s license was revoked, but no biggie. A subset of the sired kids has sued to compel the sperm bank to disclose his identity. There’s a long running joke about how Vaughn’s best defense is to “plead insanity,” a concept so irrelevant to the subject at hand it’s amazing the filmmakers’ legal counsel didn’t step in to say something. There is exactly one laugh in “Delivery Man,” and it comes in a moment of extemporization by Vaughn. That’s what the whole movie should have been: Vaughn’s unique genius, not fidelity to this god-awful source material.

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