Let's be realistic.

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Dan Trunkman (Vince Vaughn) walks out of his company and starts his own firm. He takes with him Tim McWinters (Tom Wilkinson) a 67 year old employee who was let go due to restructuring and Mike Pancake (Dave Franco) a slow kid who was there interviewing for a job. He thinks they are going to build a starship.The work they actually do is selling "swarf" which is metal waste. Apparently this is a tough competitive business whose details the film spares us. Our three misfits travel to Berlin to compete against their old company on a proposal. Dan has all kind of problems at home which he handles by phone until he gets tired and freezes his face causing his family to blame the cell phone and hang up. Oh sorry that was part of the comedy.The subplot with the kids was poorly executed and was literally phoned in. The character development for the two side kicks didn't start until over halfway through and the problem was they sad characters desperately trying to break some mold. This appears to be a film that you would expect Seth Rogen and James Franco to carry with a few ad libs. The jokes failed. Bad script. Actors never had a chance.

In my work and travels, I've experienced some variation of all of the goofball characters and difficult situations portrayed in Unfinished Business - it speaks to the business life well. For this reason, I'm giving it a higher score than I might have otherwise. Still, it has a 5.5 right now, and that is not accurate. This is actually a very entertaining movie with a good mix of comedy and mild drama.Vince Vaughn character reminded me of myself. Trying balance work, family, and getting emotionally connected with individuals from both sides. The interesting part is the flaws that are so obvious in the people he supports, yet he believes in them and refuses to give up. I like that kind of message.I found it funny, touching, and maybe just a little inspirational. Give it a chance - you can do a lot worse out there.

Tired of playing second-fiddle to his obnoxious boss, businessman Dan Trunkman quits and forms his own competing mineral sales firm. He takes a retiring associate and a dim-witted sales applicant with him. After a year and a half of struggle, a promising deal is in sight, but promptly folds, thanks to Dan's ex-boss. Determined to save the deal, Dan and company fly to Germany, where a series of outrageous obstacles awaits.........Given the body of work that Vaughn has given us over the past ten years, you would think that this would be a straight forward, Hall Pass type of movie, where the three main characters get up to nothing but hi-jinks and party hard all the time.But it's nothing like that, in fact, it's quite a depressing movie about three people who go for broke, and have a moment of self realisation halfway through the second act.Wilkinson plays the miserable older chap who hates his wife, life, and just wants to do something special for once. Franco plays the joker of the bunch, always making mistakes and causing havoc, but them there is a revaluation about him having some sort of learning difficulty, and it sours the humour that he was suppose to provide before this, and after.And then there's Vaughn. The usual cocky character has long gone from the likes of that one where he was sarcastic about someone, and we are left with someone who looks like he has a permanent hangover.The humour isn't there, and the desperation of the characters only makes the humour all the more detrimental to the films narrative, and there is also an awful subplot involving his son being bullied, any decent human being would go back to reality, not chase their desperations.Add Nick Frost in a worthless role, and Marsden and Miller there for the cash, and you have a really strange movie that is neither funny, nor dramatic, just existing.....

I love gratuitousness in comedies. Movies like Harold & Kumar push the envelope so far as to what's appropriate to laugh at that it just becomes absurdly entertaining. I also love comedy in my comedies. Sadly, Vince Vaughn's latest alleged comedy Unfinished Business has all the gratuitousness you could ever want, but falls short on the funny.It is intermittently amusing. And by that I mean a few moments make you smile, chuckle even, due to the ridiculousness of the situation they're in. The cast - Vince Vaughn, Dave Franco, and Tom Wilkinson - are fine. Nick Frost also has a small role, which should have been fleshed out because he has the most entertaining parts of the movie. The problem is the material just isn't good. The writing is choppy, uneven, and distractingly terrible. It would've been better for the cast to improv for an hour-and-a-half, that would at least be entertaining. The story here tries to tie together an explicit raunchy comedy with a homely family drama and a vain attempt at a business narrative that revolves completely around "the handshake." It just makes no sense, from a cohesion standpoint and a movie-making standpoint - how on earth was this green-lit? Who was the audience for this? Certainly not kids, definitely not adults. Who thought this was a good idea?It's a shame because I really like Vince Vaughn. He is fine in the movie, as is the rest of the cast, but they have absolutely nothing to work with. Throwing all the boobs and penises in the world on screen does not make a good comedy. At the end of the day, Unfinished Business should have been left unfinished.