Unfinished Business

Undervalued.

Underappreciated.

Dan Trunkman (Vince Vaughn) reacts harshly after his boss announces budget cuts that decrease his well-deserved salary, his hard work not seeming to count for much, which leads him to decide to start his own company, prorated with specialized exactitude.

He immediately hires a 67 year old ex-employee of the same company who was forced to retire, plus a youthful space cadet eagerly seeking his first job.

A strong team they forge.

One feature from the film that could have been developed differently was the dynamic (almost) established between Timothy McWinters (Tom Wilkinson) and Mike Pancake (Dave Franco).

You see it early on, Pancake knows next to nothing, and McWinters is an experienced bitter vet, Trunkman lying somewhere in between, and when Pancake asks McWinters for clarification, he steps in with seasoned awkward advice.

I was hoping Pancake's questions would become increasingly ridiculous and McWinters's answers increasingly inappropriate as Unfinished Business progressed, Trunkman offering chill intermediary comments, but this didn't really happen.

They're hoping to close a big deal and find themselves competing against Trunkman and McWinters's former company, in Germany, and their former boss is ahead of the game, and revelling in self-satisfied obnoxiousness.

Trunkman must child rear while negotiating the deal and this is where the film steps up, Vaughn adding a new dimension to his persona, or at least one which I've never seen him develop so well before, believably portraying a caring, loving, dad, loved the motionless fake screen freeze technique.

It doesn't detract from his parenting.

It also steps up with American Businessman 42, a work of living art, seriously comedic, informatively pranked.

There are also some exploits, the aforementioned team.

Not the strongest film I've seen starring Vaughn, but the traditional sublime underdog functioning playfully yet competently is present, providing cultural insights that make sense in terms of community development, sidewinding and succeeding, workin' it, pushin' it, livin' it.

Wilkinson and Franco round things out.

Could have been diggin' a bit deeper.