'Delivery Man' Review: Vince Vaughn Brings A Lot Of Laughs And Heart

Much of Delivery Man stars the Vince Vaughn we’ve come to expect; but there’s something slightly different this time around. It’s not the puffier face or the thicker waistband. It’s the eyes. These days Vaughn does a lot of acting with a squint or a gaze; he can express joy, pride, remorse and regret all with his eyes. And it feels genuine. This authenticity carries a movie like Delivery Man, where his character’s backstory is not sufficiently developed; looking in his eyes, you may not know the source of all that sorrow or regret, but what matters is that it’s there, and we find ourselves caring for Vaughn’s character even if we’re not entirely sure why.

Vaughn plays David Wosniak, a meat delivery truck driver who is perpetually late for work, grows marijuana in his run-down apartment, neglects his pregnant girlfriend—when he argues that he didn’t know she was pregnant she fires back, “You would if you called!”— and owes the loan sharks $80,000. If that isn’t enough, after another long day in which he racked up a fistful of parking tickets and got his family business’ truck towed, Wosniak comes home late to find a stern man in a slick suit lurking in his dining room. “The back door was already broken in,” the man quips, before informing Wosniak that, because of a mix-up at a fertility clinic many years earlier, he is the biological father of 533 children.

For now the kids only know that their father goes by the alias “Starbuck,” but more than 100 of them have filed a lawsuit in an attempt to expose Wosniak. When Wosniak learns of the lawsuit, he is given a pamphlet filled with the identities of all of the children who are suing him and, against his lawyer’s (Chris Pratt) advice, he decides to open it up. Wosniak quickly finds himself caring for each one he meets. Some of his biological kids are wild successes (he helps one “son” land an acting role and watches another play professional basketball), while others are struggling (one of his “daughters” suffers a drug overdose in front of him and he must rush her to the hospital).

Delivery Man is far from perfect; Pratt's charm is bludgeoned by his character’s bitterness and exhaustion; and there’s a bizarre tangent in which Wosniak spends too much time with one of his children who aggressively competes for his attention (like Kathy Bates in Misery).

Still, Delivery Man offers up a handful of poignant moments. Vaughn has made a living playing slackers who mean well, but can never seem to do good, and he has always known how to make us laugh. But about halfway through Delivery Man, he prompted the woman sitting next to me to lean forward, reach into her purse and take out a tissue. She was crying.