Monday Morning Critic – The Failure of Unfinished Business And The Career Bottoming of Vince Vaughn

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MMC

After two weeks the writing is on the wall for Vince Vaughn’s Unfinished Business. With a very modest budget of $35 million, the film has yet to cross the $10 million budget domestically in box office grosses and so far is on pace to lose money in the tens of millions for Fox. So far it hasn’t made as much domestically as The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which has a cast mainly comprised of elderly Brits and is focusing on drawing in a much smaller target audience (in terms of buying a ticket to see a movie), did during its opening weekend. When all is said and done a film headlined by Judi Dench and Maggie Smith will have thoroughly and profoundly outdrawn a comedy headlined by one of comedy’s supposedly biggest stars of the past decade.

It’s fairly sad … but this was something that has been coming for a long time. Vaughn has been having big failures for the last couple of years but there has never been a film that has failed on such a spectacular level as Unfinished Business has. It even earned bad reviews from both fans and critics, both of which rated it very poorly on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s a certified, genuine and profound flop and it represents the cratering of Vince Vaughn’s career.

It’s a downer, as he seems to be a celebrity who gets what that means on a macro level, but it comes down to one singular reason why Unfinished Business is the latest film property by Vaughn to flop. People are sick of the Trent character he’s essentially been playing in comedies exclusively in the past 20 years. Swingers celebrates its 20th anniversary next year, for those keeping track, and Vaughn has essentially been playing the following guy for almost his entire career.

The fast talking wise cracker has essentially been Vaughn’s go to character for his entire career. Swingers was the second film he ever made, after a cameo role in Rudy, and ever since he’s essentially been playing the same character any time a film needs Vaughn to be funny. Every one of his signature, major roles has been a variant on this initial role and now it’s come to a point where he’s the first of that troop of American comic actors that profoundly influenced the American comedy scene over the first decade of the 21st century to have found out that the game has moved on from him.

Vaughn hasn’t had a film cross $50 million domestically since 2009 and his two prior films to this (The Internship, Delivery Man) both marginally made money at best. So this isn’t a new thing, for Vaughn to be a part of a film that wasn’t financially successful. It’s just the latest in a string of failures that represents the cratering of Vince Vaughn’s career.

Stuff for General George S. Pimpage, Esq

I reviewed Liam Neeson’s latest, Run All Night, right here.

Travis tackled the live action Cinderella here.

If you want to pimp anything email it to me with a good reason why. It helps to bribe me with stuff, just saying ….

What Looks Good This Weekend, and I Don’t Mean the $2 tall boys of Red Fox and community college co-eds with low standards at the Fox and Hound

The Gunman – Sean Penn’s a badass and such.

Skip it – Sean Penn is the last guy who can play tough … and we’re supposed to buy him as a meat eating super assassin? Yeah.

Insurgent – The sequel to the moderate YA hit Divergent.

Skip it – The first one wasn’t very good and I can’t imagine the sequel is any better.

Do You Believe? – A preacher gets his faith questioned or something. It’s getting over 1,000 theatres nationwide.

Skip it – It’s a Christian faith based film with a substantial cast, getting released on a Freelance Releasing style platform.

Scott “Kubryk” Sawitz brings his trademarked irreverence and offensive hilarity to Twitter in 140 characters or less. Follow him @ScottSawitz .