Vince Vaughn's 'Unfinished Business' a farcical mess

The weird badness, or the bad weirdness, of Vince Vaughn's train wreck farce "Unfinished Business" can be traced back to Steve Conrad's dual personality screenplay that, in one scene, appeals to the Walt Disney family values crowd.

Yet, in the next, it panders to the lowest frat boy denominators of grossly explicit nudity, drugs, insane parties and imaginative sexual positions.

Vaughn's character, St. Louis businessman and family man Dan Trunkman, possesses a good heart. But every time director Ken Scott (he did Vaughn's 2013 "Delivery Man") tries to transplant it into the body of Conrad's loopy script, it's roundly rejected.

At the start, a frustrated Dan argues with his female supervisor Chuck Portnoy (Sienna Miller), resulting in his departure from a mineral sales company called Dynamic.

Dan forms his own competitive firm, Apex, with two ragtag partners: a 67-year-old burnout named Tim McWinters (a profoundly slumming Tom Wilkinson) and young Mike Pancake (a winning, grinning Dave Franco), a few arrows short of a full quiver.

A year later, however, the trio is still meeting in a coffee shop and scrambling for business.

Finally, just when Dan appears to snag a lucrative partnership with the Benjaminson Group in Germany, it becomes apparent that Apex might be a "fluffer," a corporate decoy used by Benjaminson to secure a better deal from Chuck Portnoy's company Dynamic.

So, Dan, Tim and Mike hop a jet to get their business proposal confirmed in person, while attempting to bypass Chuck and Jim Spinch (James Marsden), her inside man within Benjaminson Group.

Dan, Tim and Mike arrive in Berlin at the same time as the Folsom Europe gay fetish festival. So, they wind up in fogs of drugs, booze and sex, culminating in a strange and yet nervously hilarious, graphic gay sex club scene.

There, they run into Bill Whilmsley (Nick Frost), a key figure who might be able to connect them with the Benjaminson Group.

Meanwhile, back in St. Louis, Dan's depressed, overweight son Paul (Britton Sear) wrestles with Internet bullies and low self esteem as Dan's daughter Bess (Ella Anderson) gets pinched by school authorities for beating up an Indian student.

Dan's ultra-patient, never-nagging, even-keeled wife (June Diane Raphael) pretty much waits for him to come home and be the dad he apparently never has time to be.

Even when Dan makes flimsy attempts to write up a father/daughter homework assignment for Bess while in Berlin, those come off as exactly what they are - easy ways for Dan to narrate chunks of "Unfinished Business" and help Conrad present exposition and interior monologues.

In scenes between Dan and his family members, Scott goes through the motions of emotions without a whit of conviction or sincerity.

Dan's frequent outbursts of positive reinforcement to both his kids and his partners ("You've got to pick yourself up and push ahead!") feel desperate and calculated, a cheap way to give a frat-house comedy some feeble human connection.

This is one mess of a movie with just enough lowbrow laughs to stave off the narrative malaise threatening to freeze the story the same way Dan pretends to "freeze" during Face-Time chats whenever he wants to avoid confronting family problems.

“Unfinished Business”

★ ½

Starring: Vince Vaughn, Tom Wilkinson, Dave Franco, Sienna Miller, James Marsden, Nick Frost

Directed by: Ken Scott

Other: A 20th Century Fox release. Rated R for drug use, language, nudity, sexual situations. 90 minutes