Delivery Man

By 2013, the high-concept studio comedy was gasping for air, caught between the R-rated gross-out dominance of the Apatow era and the encroaching shadow of the MCU. Into this identity crisis stumbled Delivery Man, a film that arrived with the marketing energy of a raunchy sex farce but the actual soul of a Sunday morning church retreat. It is a movie that shouldn't exist as it does—a shot-for-shot, director-for-director remake of a French-Canadian hit that somehow decided Vince Vaughn, the patron saint of the fast-talking jerk, was the right man to play a vessel of pure, unadulterated paternal warmth.

The Remake Nobody Asked For

The backstory of Delivery Man is a peak example of Hollywood’s "if it ain't broke, fix it anyway" mentality. Just two years prior, director Ken Scott released Starbuck, a charming Quebecois film about a man who discovers his prolific sperm donations decades earlier resulted in 533 children. It was a massive hit in Canada. Rather than just letting Americans read subtitles, DreamWorks hired Ken Scott to fly to New York and film the exact same movie, just with more recognizable faces and a significantly larger craft services budget.

Watching it now feels like a strange artifact of that transitional period where studios still believed a mid-budget comedy could pull $100 million on star power alone. I watched this recently while trying to fix a leaky faucet in my kitchen—I ended up ignoring the plumbing and just staring at the screen, mostly because I couldn't believe how much I missed seeing Chris Pratt before he had to spend four hours a day in a gym.

Vaughn’s Quiet Pivot and the Pratt Factor

This isn't the Vince Vaughn of Old School or Wedding Crashers. There are no rapid-fire riffs about ear earmuffs or motorboating. Instead, we get "Soft Vince." As David Wozniak, a meat delivery driver who owes money to thugs (a plot point that feels like it belongs in a different movie), Vince Vaughn spends most of the runtime looking perpetually misty-eyed. He decides to peek at the profiles of his "kids" and starts acting as a secret guardian angel to them. It’s sweet, sure, but it’s also borderline creepy if you think about it for more than six consecutive seconds.

The real reason to revisit this film, however, is Chris Pratt. This was 2013. Parks and Recreation was in its prime, but Guardians of the Galaxy hadn't yet turned him into an interstellar action figure. As Brett, David’s best friend and struggling lawyer, Chris Pratt is carrying about thirty extra pounds of "dad bod" and 100% of the film’s actual humor. His comedic timing is effortless, playing a miserable father of four who treats a lawsuit about 533 children as a welcome vacation from his own house.

We also get early glimpses of Britt Robertson and Jack Reynor (who would later go on to Midsommar) as two of the offspring. Cobie Smulders, fresh off the success of The Avengers and still anchored to How I Met Your Mother, plays David’s pregnant girlfriend, Emma. She does what she can with a thankless "why can't you be a grown-up?" role, but the movie is much more interested in David’s biological brood than his actual romantic partner.

A High-Concept Identity Crisis

The problem with Delivery Man—and the reason it’s largely been relegated to the bargain bin of digital streaming—is its tone. It wants to be a "feel-good movie of the year," but the premise is fundamentally absurd. The film treats sperm donation with the kind of reverence usually reserved for organ donation or war heroism. There’s a scene where David attends a retreat for his biological children, and the cinematography by Eric Alan Edwards (My Own Private Idaho) shifts into this golden, ethereal glow that suggests we’re watching a spiritual awakening rather than a legal nightmare.

Looking back, this film captures that specific 2010s earnestness that has since been replaced by irony. It’s a movie that trusts its audience to get choked up over a montage of Vince Vaughn watching a street performer or helping a drug-addicted daughter through a withdrawal. It’s undeniably manipulative, yet it’s hard to stay mad at a movie that is this aggressively nice.

The score by Jon Brion—the genius behind the music for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. He provides a whimsical, melancholic backdrop that almost convinces you you're watching a sophisticated indie dramedy instead of a movie where the main conflict is settled by a class-action lawsuit from a fertility clinic's filing error.

Delivery Man isn't a disaster, but it is a "nice" movie that failed to realize that "nice" is usually the kiss of death for a comedy. It’s worth a look if only to see Chris Pratt at the height of his lovable-schlub powers and to witness Vince Vaughn trying to retire his "fast-talking wiseguy" jersey in favor of something more paternal. It’s a pleasant, slightly overlong sit that will make you smile a few times and then immediately evaporate from your brain the moment the credits roll. If you find it on a lazy Sunday afternoon, you could do much worse, but you could also just watch the original Starbuck and see it done with a bit more grit and a lot more Gallic charm.