Ken Scott’s remake of his own film, Starbuck, has been put together with a nearly scene-for-scene deference to replication. How odd, then, that Delivery Man, the English language version of the French Canadian comedy, is mysteriously missing the humor present in the earlier version while mirthlessly retaining the schmaltz.
Messing up foreign films for American consumption is certainly nothing new, but when the same director casts a wrecking ball on his own work eyebrows are raised.
Delivery Man excises Starbuck’s hilarious first scene, where the hapless lead character is shown, via flashback, in a clinic donating the sperm that will get him into so much trouble. Was this to sanitize the American version? One can’t be sure but what is clear is Delivery Man operates in a gentler mode than its predecessor. Starbuck’s lead actor, Patrick Huard, may realize his character, David Wozniak, is hopelessly bumbling but he maintains a leathery, above-it-all posture throughout it all. He owes a fortune to vengeful debtors, curries little respect from his family, and has just impregnated his girlfriend, who’s subsequently even more eager to reject him. Yet he gives us laughs when we find out his activity at the clinic sired more than 500 offspring, most of who are now looking for him.
Vince Vaughn, on the other hand, seems to be moving in semi-stunned slow motion. He’s not exactly walking on eggshells–more, in a perpetual daze. When he starts to surreptitiously look up his kids and exert a guardian angel whammy, we get all the cornball drama but the comic relief scarcely shows up.
Especially gooey is a scene where Vaughn accidentally walks into a meeting of his kids, organized to discover the identity of their dad, after following one of them. Several of them converge on him since they’ve recently received his good deeds. None of them seems to wonder why this strange altruistic guy who’s old enough to be their dad shows up at a meeting to find their dad. A meat delivery man for his family’s business, he shows up at a picnic and barbecues enough vittles to feed North Philly on Thanksgiving: still no suspicions.
Supporting characters in Delivery Man also pale in comparison to the original. Wozniak’s girlfriend had much subtlety in Starbucks. Here she’s one-dimensional pedestrian. Wozniak’s attorney, a key supporting role as a self-mocking and self-doubting underachiever, just isn’t funny enough here. Like the rest of Delivery Man, he leads us to the sensation ghat we’ve just walked into a Broadway play on an understudy day.
2 – Its’ Own Director Still Can’t Save An American Remake (out of 5 stars)