COMIC DRAMA; 1hr 44min
STARRING: Vince Vaughn, Chris Pratt, Cobie Smulders
Father's day: Vaughn (middle, second row)
Nobody does man-child teddy bear like Vince Vaughn and his gabby, overgrown-kid appeal. Vaughn’s New York City meat-truck driver, David Wozniak, starts out as one of those kids: $80,000 in the hole, with a disillusioned, pregnant girlfriend (Smulders). And there’s one other thing: in the 1990s, David fathered 533 children via anonymous sperm donations. Oops! Now, 142 of them have launched a lawsuit to force him to come forward.
This is a shock. Then David gets curious: handed an envelope of profiles by his bff and sort-of lawyer (Pratt) with the admonition not to open it, he nonetheless gets stuck in, secretly chasing up his eclectic bio-brood. As he drops in on their lives, he develops a sense of responsibility conspicuously lacked.
While writer-director Ken Scott’s screenplay — a remake of his 2011 French-Canadian film Starbuck — isn’t a laugh riot with its lacklustre patches and choppy flow, the concept has oodles of brotherly love and a curly behavioural question hooked to its core. In discovering that following a moral compass can be a challenge, David finally grows up. Which isn’t the mouthy romp that Vaughn nuts might anticipate, but hey, even man-children can’t stay boys forever.
