When it screened as the opening night feature of the 2013 Milwaukee Film Festival, director Ken Scott’s French-Canadian breakthrough "Starbuck" played like a cinematic Trojan horse. The movie arrived disguised in a raunchy comedy premise – a man discovers he’s the father of 533 children after some sperm donation shenanigans – but the crude concept wound up being a ruse, hiding a story filled with a surprising amount of sweetness and tenderness. 

Scott attempts to pull off a similar gambit with his latest film, "Unfinished Business." There’s just one problem: It’s not pretending to be a raunchy comedy; it IS a raunchy comedy, one with more full-frontal male nudity than "50 Shades of Grey" – a movie built solely around kinky sex. Instead of trying to fill a bunch of sweetness and earnest drama into the thin façade of a Trojan horse, Scott’s attempting to do so with a real horse. Predictably, it’s a rough fit. It’s messy and clumsy and unconvincing and Vince Vaughn winds up teaching fatherly lessons about bullying in the same movie where Dave Franco slams his face against a German man’s flaccid penis sticking out of a gloryhole.

So yeah, like I said: a rough fit.

Adding yet another cinematic underdog everyman to his growingly tedious collection, a fairly restrained Vaughn stars as hardworking St. Louis businessman and distracted family man Dan Trunkman. After refusing to take a pay cut from his callous boss (Sienna Miller), Dan quits his job to start his own rival company selling leftover metal shavings called swarf. The first sign of disconnect – or just plain disinterest – in the final product: Miller’s boss character is given the common women’s name of … Chuck.

Anyways, working with only himself and a duo of misfits – one too old (an unfortunate Tom Wilkinson), the other backpack-bucklingly too young (Dave Franco) – Dan’s startup struggles to keep things afloat. However, the gang is close to wrapping up a major deal; all they need to do is travel to Germany and snag a handshake to make it official.

Things unfortunately aren’t that simple though, as the potential client (led by James Marsden and Nick Frost) pits Dan’s startup against Chuck, using one of the two company’s as a "fluffer" to finagle the best price. Desperate to prove their worth, land the deal and beat Dan’s cold-blooded former employer in the process, the trio scampers across Germany shaving down their numbers, chasing down their business suitors and putzing around into all sorts of bawdy antics along the way. Cue the aforementioned gloryholes and German hostel debauchery.  

The European road trip plot solely functions as a loose skeleton for the guys to fart around and get themselves into trouble abroad. Even though these bones desperately need some calcium – it’s a lazy and shaggy do-nothing story mostly about people just waiting around that has the forward momentum of a glacier – it’d be passable if the meat fleshing it out was sufficiently entertaining or fun. Unfortunately, Ken Scott doesn’t appear to have much interest in making audiences laugh – despite the fact that "Unfinished Business" is ostensibly a comedy.

Steven Conrad’s desperately joke-deprived script – relying heavily on witless old man profanity, stale sex gags and just plain inappropriate banter – certainly doesn’t help. It’s the kind of comedy that assumes weed, partying and sex are inherently amusing and crazy, no jokes necessary other than maybe a cheap throwaway reference to Snoop Lion or a laugh at a goofy name.

However, even when it has a decent comedic premise – such as Dan’s hotel room serving as a living art installation ("Business Man No. 47") or a chase inside of a huge hamster ball – Scott does "Unfinished Business" no favors. He gives the film the same lifeless pacing and dead-eyed sensibility as his previous Vince Vaughn collaboration "Delivery Man." I previously attributed that movie’s dull half-heartedness to Scott trudging through an almost shot-for-shot remake of "Starbuck," but judging from this latest effort, it seems that tired disinterest might just be a part of his auteurial stamp.

Even when the movie tries to go crazy and off the rails – with not just one, but two big drug and alcohol fueled party scenes – the drab visuals and editing barely let the material rise to bar mitzvah levels of insanity. It’s a wannabe raunchy R-rated movie, but Scott’s bland direction makes it feel like it goes to bed by 6 p.m.

Instead of the humor, Scott’s misguidedly much more interested in the emotional drama going on off to the side, namely Dan’s family issues involving his children on both sides of the bullying spectrum. Scott invests these scenes – of Dan attempting to get through to his bullied children, or of Dan learning about his colleagues’ disappointing home lives – with earnest heart.

That’s nice, but in this movie, it’s an unwieldy tonal fit. Scenes of Tom weirdly talking around masturbation to his son – with, once again, little interest in finding anything funny about the interaction – slam jarringly into a sincere bullying subplot, complete with drippily sappy "7th Heaven" music cues (the score overall is pretty terrible, cheaply underlining every joke or sentimental emotional note).

It’s not as though there’s something special about the drama in Conrad’s script either, that it’s particularly adept with the film’s emotional beats. The movie’s flailing attempt at connecting with the zeitgeist – economic tensions, everyman versus the big man, etc. – lands on par with the comedy: cheap, tired and droopily delivered. Certain plot points – even the small stuff, like a couple having a Facetime conversation about personal matters in front of others sans headphones – ring false, and the characters are poorly conceived.

Wilkinson’s old dog character is clearly trapped in the movie’s vortex of sweetness and sleaziness. "Unfinished Business" wants the audience to sincerely care and feel for his mission to get a divorce from his loveless marriage. However, the movie only gives us his word that his wife is overbearing and loveless – and this is a character who spends most of the film spouting profanity, ordering sex workers and leering at ladies. It’s a plotline that gets nowhere close to earning its desired emotions. The same goes for Franco’s dim youngster, who is eventually revealed to be … homeless? An orphan? Mentally disabled? The character is written and directed so vaguely that, no matter which is the case, it doesn’t land.

Still, the character is worth having around for Franco, the film’s lone source of comedy – especially his giggly, giddy excitement about seeing naked people. He’s the only one around in the surprisingly deep cast who seems invested in making people laugh. As for everyone else, well, Nick Frost gets to play a character whose main attribute is a huge penis, Wilkinson gets to be in a pillow fight with naked coeds and Vaughn has a McConaissance-like dramatic resurrection to set up with "True Detective" season two.

Those all seem to be rational reasons for them to have invested time in a what’s otherwise a cloyingly mediocre heartwarmer sandwiched into a tired risqué road trip comedy. And as for audiences … I’ve got nothing.