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Vince Vaughn as a stud? He fails to rise to the occasion in limp sperm-donor comedy Delivery Man

PUBLISHED: 19:09 EST, 9 January 2014 | UPDATED: 19:16 EST, 9 January 2014

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Delivery Man (12A)

Verdict: Limp comedy

[reviewStars]

If sperm donorship had been around 60 years ago, and considered fair game for a Hollywood comedy, it is interesting to consider what Billy Wilder and Jack Lemmon, or even Cary Grant, might have made of the concept of an amiable loser who, 20 years after multiple donations, finds he has fathered 533 children.

Vince Vaughn, alas, simply doesn’t have the lightness of touch to give this film the charm it badly needs.

And writer-director Ken Scott, remaking his own 2011 French-Canadian film Starbuck, is no Wilder.

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Limp comedy: Vince Vaughn is affable underachiever David Wozniak, whose mundane life is turned upside down when he finds out he fathered 533 children through anonymous donations to a fertility clinic

As meat delivery driver David Wozniak, whose problems are compounded by a debt to the mob and a pregnant girlfriend tiring of his irresponsibility, Vaughn does his lumbering best.

And there are some amusing moments as he resolves to become a ‘guardian angel’ to his numerous offspring without revealing himself as the prolific donor ‘Starbuck’.

But, big fellow though he is, Vaughn is not broad-shouldered enough to carry a picture that too often changes personality, lurching from knockabout comedy to heavy schmaltz to philosophical treatise about the meaning of fatherhood.