Delivery Man doesn't inspire a whole lot of confidence - everything about its publicity campaign suggests that this is yet another frat-boy comedy built around Vince Vaughn's arrested-development screen persona. This time, he isn't crashing a wedding or getting an internship at Google: he's fathering 533 kids! It sounds terrible, but actually isn't - at least in its first half, which is an interesting, emotionally powerful look at the notions of fatherhood and responsibility. It's actually a shame that the film stumbles as determinedly as it does into its uncomfortably cheerful ending.
Chronic underachiever David (Vaughn) can barely keep his life together: he's hugely in debt, he constantly disappoints his family, and his on-off girlfriend Emma (Cobie Smulders) has decided that he's not fit to be the father of their unborn child. Life only gets more complicated when he discovers that - thanks to his earlier incarnation as prolific sperm donor Starbuck - he's the biological father of 533 children, 142 of whom are trying to find out who he is by contesting the confidential agreements he signed with the fertility clinic many years ago.
Writer-director Ken Scott's film - a remake of his own Canadian film-festival hit Starbuck - has a lot going for it: David is written and played as an appealingly hopeless, oddly sweet failure of a man, one who tries so hard, with such good intentions, that you want to forgive him the worst of his many transgressions. This characteristic is precisely why the first half of the film works so well. David's tentative attempts to find out more about his offspring yield moments both funny and emotional, whether he's trying to help out one son by taking a disastrous shift as a barista, or struggling to find the right things to say to a bedridden young man (Sébastien René, who's so heartbreakingly good that he's the only actor to be in both versions of Scott's film).
But the film stutters and suffers as it goes on. It all gets snowed under by ever thicker layers of sentiment (at one point, David tells the Starbuck kids that, whatever the outcome of the legal appeal, hey, at least they've found brothers and sisters in one another!). Frustratingly, too, David's relationship with Emma keeps falling by the wayside. By the time it's picked up again at the end, they deal with David's extreme fatherhood in only the most perfunctory and unsatisfying of ways.
For all its second-act troubles, Delivery Man is at least memorable for giving Vaughn a little more to do than he usually does in his paint-by-numbers comedies. He works particularly well with Chris Pratt, who plays David's cynical, struggling lawyer/best friend Brett. Unfortunately, Vaughn gives an unexpectedly likable performance in a film that's desperately uneven. Its story is interesting and the execution initially promising, but Delivery Man stumbles too quickly and earnestly towards an ending that's too convenient to match its protagonist's truly complicated predicament.
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