This is a new thing for me. I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the best writer, but I thought I’d give it ago. Another struggle I had was the topic. Although I like football I don’t think I would be able to offer very good opinions about it because to be honest I’m very biased to one side. The idea of doing a game review was never really an idea. I basically play one game, Fifa, and a few other games here and there. Then I had the idea of movie reviews, it’s something I enjoy and hopefully can write about… so anyway, lets get into my first review, recently released Delivery Man.
To me, this film was a bit of a let down. I’d been waiting for this film for a while, and although it didn’t look the funniest comedy film of all time, the story line had a certain intrigue and uniqueness that drew me in. I mean it’s not everyday a struggling man comes home to find that he is the father of 534 children. However, it followed the exact same format as most films. Intro>problem occurs> problem starts to be solved> dilemma> Solved. Surely, a story like this would have most writers licking their lips with excitement over what they could do with it. It has so much potential, but the outcome was poor. One of the worst things for me is the fact that I’d spent the entire week listening to a friend tell me that it look bad and that I would be disappointed. Of course, I didn’t want to be wrong, but sadly on this occasion I was.
The plot of the film is simple. A middle aged man named David Wozniak (Vince Vaughn) finds out he is about to have his life completely changed when he finds out his current girlfriend, Emma, is pregnant. However, that’s the least of his worries. Poor David soon finds out that donating sperm 600+ times probably wasn’t the best idea when he was younger. I mean, who is stupid enough, or even has enough free time, to go to the clinic and donate 600 times in their youth. Not many I can tell you that. So after finding out that he is now the biological father of 533 children ( and soon to be 534) under the donation name of ‘Starbuck’ it can’t get much worse… you’d think.
Well now poor David has to attend court because 126 of these kids have suddenly decided that they wish to know their fathers identity. This made no sense to me what so ever. Why on earth only 126 of these children are included in the court case is a cheap cop out by director Ken Scott. In all honesty the whole film felt like it was being wrote lazily as the film would pick up side stories which had a good potential to give the film a break from the main story. However, most of these stories were random and just didn’t make any sense in this sort of film.
An instance of this was a story of debt. David starts the film in a large debt and the fact that he is in debt seems to drop on and off throughout the film. I won’t spoil his solution to the debt; lets put it this way, it wasn’t the most satisfying way to end the film. It felt rushed and made me wonder why this was even included in the film. The ending to this side story could have been done within the first 5 minutes of the film or any point and it just angered to why it wasn’t solved earlier on. After already feeling cheated out of this story I was praying that somehow Scott could pull off an amazing twist and end the film on a high. How wrong I was. The only thing I have to say about the end of the story is that the reaction to Davids girlfriends finding out about his secret was poor. It took about 5 minutes for her to go from what she described as “the angriest she had ever been” to completely fine with being the step mother of 534 children. Surely, any one with any sort of logical mind would take a lot longer than 5 minutes to decide whether or not to marry a man with so many children. Whether it was a case of lazy acting or poor directing is hard to see, either way it was disappointing.
Like i stated early one thing about this movie that i actually liked was the story. It was original and unique, something that is lacking from films today. However, like you would imagine, it’s very hard to squeeze out an hour and a half movie out of one idea. To me, it felt like it dragged on more than it should have. There was no real excitement or stand-out hilarious moments that would leave me discussing with my friends about for a few days afterwards.
The failure of the film cannot even be blamed on the actors. The obvious supposed ‘star’ of this film was Vince Vaughn. I say supposed because to me he wasn’t the best actor in this particular film. Don’t get me wrong, Vince is a great actor and has proven so in the past with 2 of my all time favorite movies: Dodge ball and The Internship. However, I doubt he’ll be adding The Delivery Man to his CV any time soon. He was out shined by someone I hadn’t seen before this film, Chris Pratt. He took on the role of the main characters best friend and also a discredited lawyer. Most of the best moments of the film included Chris and he held the film together in my opinion. I for one will be walking away for this film and adding some of his other material to my watch list.
Overall, this film didn’t meet my expectations. When I go watching a film I don’t tend to demand much, but what I do wish for is an intriguing story with a few twists and a set of actors who can actually be bothered to play their roles and aren’t just doing it for money. However, Delivery Man lacked a lot of these features and left me feeling disappointing as I stood in the freezing cold waiting for a lift home . It wasn’t all bad. There were some positives to be taken from the screen, although they were limited. I wouldn’t recommend you take time out of your schedule to watch this, but it might be a decent time killer with a few friends. For a film of that name, it didn’t deliver very well.
I was tempted to give this a measly 3/10 but ill offer it another 2 for the character portrayal by Chris..
so overall i’d rate it at a 5/10.
Thank you for reading and i hope to make another soon. Hopefully on a better film next time.
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