Delivery Man (2013)

Delivery Man arrives in 2013 with the soft tread of a film that has no interest in the culture wars, largely because it predates them. Vince Vaughn plays David Wozniak, a genial underachiever who learns he has fathered 533 children through student-era sperm donations, and 142 of them have sued to learn his name. The picture is a shot-for-shot remake of the Canadian comedy Starbuck, which is the sort of detail that tells us everything about its ambitions. It wants to be liked. It does not want to argue.

The classification work here is brief. The sprawling cast of offspring includes a range of faces in the background, though the principals are uniformly white and nobody frames that as a statement. Cobie Smulders plays a police officer and expectant mother, a role that exists to give the hero something to lose. Race is never raised. Neither is climate, nor queerness, nor body image, nor neurodivergence, nor any revision of the historical record. The lawsuit against the fertility clinic is a personal and legal pickle, not an indictment of commerce. Even the thugs who chase David for eighty thousand dollars are treated as weather, not as evidence of a broken system.

All that remains is a gentle, foggy sermon about the importance of fathers, delivered without a single modern talking point attached. That sentimentality is the film's only faint pulse of messaging, and it belongs to an older, warmer tradition of Hollywood moralizing. Nothing here lectures. Nothing here provokes. The result is a film that will offend no one and persuade no one, which is its own kind of achievement. As a specimen of contemporary cultural consciousness, it is the equivalent of a glass of room-temperature tap water: not unpleasant, not memorable, and entirely without vintage.