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Delivery Man

5/10

Stars: Vince Vaughn, Cobie Smulders, Chris Pratt

Director: Ken Scott

This dramedy about a sperm donor who finds he's fathered 533 children, 142 of whom are trying to find out who he is, just barely skirts the borders of embarrassment.

David Wozniak (Vaughn), a meat truck driver, whose own girlfriend Emma (Smulders, wasted again) is also pregnant, is the despair of his family. On a whim, however, he decides to track down the 142 interested parties, one by one.

Naturally, they prove to be a cross-section of American life: a basketball ace, a female junkie, an actor, a bisexual who is two-timing his girlfriend with guys, a hopelessly disabled case, and so on. Yes, the film pulls all the emotional strings it can find, although some of them do work some of the time.

Vaughn does his best with this odd central role, but doesn't have much a range of emotions to offer it. The French-Canadian original, made by the same director two years earlier, under the title Starbuck - Vaughn's character's nom de plume at the sperm bank - was considerably better; this one is as forgettable as its title.

David Quinlan

USA 2014. UK Distributor: Entertainment One (DreamWorks). Technicolor/prints by deluxe.
104 minutes. Widescreen. UK certificate: 12A.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 0, Violence/Horror 0, Drugs 0, Swearing 1.

Review date: 04 Jan 2014