BEFORE: I just added this to the list a few weeks ago, it's running on cable and I spotted it in the on-screen guide. I didn't realize I'd be watching it so quickly, that it would immediately play an important part of getting from April 1 to May 1, which also means it comes between "Oppenheimer" and "Barbie", if you want to look at it that way. Or it's part of the connective tissue between Easter and Mother's Day, whichever.
Nick Frost carries over from "Kinky Boots".
THE PLOT: A hard-working small business owner and his two associates travel to Europe to close the most important deal of their lives. But what began as a routine business trip goes off the rails in every way imaginable.
AFTER: It's like somebody tried to make "Dodgeball" into a film about other businesses - you rooted for the Average Joes in that sports setting because they were the underdogs, they had a near-zero chance of winning their games but they had heart, and misplaced optimism, and part of you wants to believe that's enough to succeed in this world. But in the world of business, any business, we all know that probably isn't true.
Take restaurants, a big chain restaurant has a corporate structure and an advertising budget, and therefore it's got more visibility, name recognition, customer awareness, where a mom-and-pop diner has none of those things, just maybe a local following, possibly a good location, and maybe better food, but really, it's all a gamble. You see a Starbucks or a Dunkin Donuts anywhere, and you know what to expect, maybe it's a little boring but you know at least there will be standards, but a regular one location coffee shop? Could be fine but you're taking your chances, right? It's like this across the board, for insurance, car sales, banking, big business has you covered - are you going to go open an account at Citibank, or Fred's Saving and Loan?
So really, this could have been any business featured in this film, but they went with swarf-selling. Swarf is apparently metal chips left over from manufacturing processes, and ideally they need to be recycled by some company, whether it's global Dynamic Systems, Inc. or a company that consists of three guys who don't even HAVE an office building, made up of two guys that used to work for Dynamic Systems and one guy they met in the parking lot after being "let go". Sure, that can be a company, and they've got NO overhead, so maybe they can keep costs down, but how are they going to get business, do the work and retain their customers?
The short answer is, they're not - but Dan Trunkman believes that they can, and without the stupid managerial systems and corporate retreat nonsense of the big guys, he can just focus on the very non-important work of recycling metal shards. (BTW, happy Earth Day, everyone, that was a happy accident, I swear...). Meanwhile the three men get to go on a business trip from St. Louis up to Portland, and while Dan assumed that they were the only company bidding for the job, after checking into the hotel he saw Chuck, his old manager from Dynamic, was also in town. Ah the fix is in, and it's possible that the client is just making a show of things, and pretending to be considering hiring a smaller company for a lesser cost to drive Dynamic's bid down, and they've got no intention of hiring Apex Select, after all.
Well, that sucks, but is it enough to hang a comedy movie on? Not really, so the plot has to send these three guys from Portland to Germany to try to do an end-run around the mid-level corporate structure in Portland, and deal with the REAL owners of the company, if they can just figure out who exactly that is. What could POSSIBLY go wrong? Well, everything of course. The three men have to drive to Hamburg to find a client who can help them get their price down, only she's relaxing at a sauna, as German people do, and doesn't trust Americans who are too stuck up and not comfortable with their bodies. SO, they all have to get naked to prove they're not like that. You have to figure no business really runs like this, it violates all kinds of H.R. codes, doesn't it?
There's more, because they get the run-around from this German company, and their meeting gets pushed back three days, so they have to find someplace to stay, only it's October, and all the hotels are booked up because of Oktoberfest, and the G8 Summit is in town, also a very large Gay Pride festival, and several other events. So the young dumb-but-well meaning worker and the older worker have to stay at a youth hostel, and Dan gets a deal on a room which is also somehow an exhibit in an art museum, and crowds watch him shave and shower and talk on the phone. Germans are weird, sure, but are they THAT weird?
In the meantime, Dan has to deal with family issues back home, his teenage son is being bullied AND cyber-bullied for being overweight, while his younger daughter is getting in trouble for being a bully herself. Dan's wife wants to put them in private school so they won't be permanently scarred, but this costs money, and unless he closes this deal in Germany, they just can't afford it. Also in the meantime, both Mike, the young guy and Timothy, the old guy are trying to get laid all the time, Mike because he's a virgin and Tim because he's been married for so long and he's never had a fling before, so yeah, sure, why not use the business trip to hire hookers who dress like maids, that couldn't possibly lead to any awkward situations at a hotel.
The biggest problem here is that none of this is remotely funny, and the film is marked as a comedy, when it's really anything but. If you make every character's situation very pathetic, that's really the antithesis of comedy, even if they then get into humorous situations, well, it's all still going to read as depressing instead of funny. Getting fired isn't funny, struggling at a company that isn't succeeding isn't funny, and then taking a desperate business trip and letting that be a further sign that nobody knows what the heck they're even doing is just piling more unfunny on top of all that.
Sure, we know they're probably going to get this deal in the end, too much screen time was invested in the trying for them not to get it in some unlikely round-about way. But then what?
You can't win business by landing one deal, just like you can't win baseball by winning one game, even if it's the last game in the World Series. Then in a few months you've got to start all over again (only it's going to be tougher because the best players on the team went and signed with other teams for more money.)
It just feels like a very poor framework for montages of German people partying, drinking, sitting naked in saunas and sticking dicks through glory holes in a gay sex club. Look, there's ALMOST a movie right there, and that seems, well, moderately interesting - but you could have filmed those scenes without all the stupid business meetings, travel mishaps and awkward family conversations and it might have worked out better, but, too bad, we'll never know.
Also starring Vince Vaughn (last seen in "Dragged Across Concrete"), Tom Wilkinson (last seen in "The Last Kiss"), Dave Franco (last seen in "Zeroville"), Sienna Miller (last seen in "An Imperfect Murder"), June Diane Raphael (last seen in "The High Note"), Ella Anderson (last seen in "The Giant Mechanical Man"), Britton Sear (last seen in "Boy Erased"), James Marsden (last seen in "Sex Drive"), Uwe Ochsenknecht, Bonita Friedericy (last seen in "House of Sand and Fog"), Kasia Malinowska, Carmen Lopez (last seen in "Two Days in New York"), Melissa McMeekin (last seen in "Hubie Halloween"), Jil Funke, Leonard Carow (last seen in "War Horse"), Rainer Reiners (last seen in "The Book Thief"), Terry Conforti (last seen in "Black Mass"), Michael Tow (last seen in "Free Guy"), Jamal Peters (last seen in "The Purge: Election Year").
RATING: 3 out of 10 slaps to the face after tequila shots
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