Delivery Man

The Internship. The Watch. The Dilemma. Couples Retreat. Four Christmases. Those are the last five leading roles that Vince Vaughn has had, and that is the kind of not-funny-run usually reserved for the likes of the truly untalented comedy actor (hi, Kevin James!). But all we have to do is look at the likes of Swingers, Dodgeball or Wedding Crashers to remind us how he used to be great. So is Delivery Man his return to greatness? Not quite, but it definitely a step in the right direction.

Vaughn plays David Wozniak, a hapless but really good-hearted guy, with a life going nowhere. He’s a delivery man for a meat-company who would’ve been fired if his boss wasn’t also his dad, he’s got a beautiful girlfriend (Cobie Smulders) who he doesn’t appreciate, and he’s got some severe money issues. On top of that, he’s just been informed that due to a clerical error at a sperm bank, he is the biological father of 533 children, and several hundred of them have formed a class-action law-suit to break the confidentiality agreement and find out who he is. Against his lawyer’s (Chris Pratt) advice, he secretly begins to follow them, interact with them, never revealing who he really is, but slowly becoming a sort of guardian angel to each and every one of them.

From that set-up, it does seem like lowest common denominator comedy set-up (hi, Kevin James!), but in fact it’s handled with much more subtlety than that. This isn’t a straight ahead comedy, as there are some genuine moments of tear-jerking drama in there, and while it never goes quite as "dark comedy" as you might hope, it does bring sufficient shades of grey. It’s very rarely laugh out loud funny, but we’re never given the impression that it is supposed to be, either.

Some of Wozniak’s kids of played by some stellar young actors – including our own Irish heartthrob Jack Reynor – plus Smulders, Pratt and Simon Delaney as Vaughn’s brother all provide solid support. But this is Vince’s show, and he’s here to remind us that he CAN be funny, but also that he CAN actually act. So if you take nothing else away from watching Delivery Man, and chances are you probably won’t, at least you can take that.