CONSIDER the variety of positions that humans adopt while copulating – missionary sometimes varied as prone à tergo or side-by-side, cowgirl, doggy, knee-trembler and wheelbarrow. Not that many, really. Wheelbarrow requires the most strength and agility.

What’s all that got to do with a film about three American businessmen, desperate to shake hands on a major deal, who find themselves in a Berlin fully booked because of a G8 meeting, Oktoberfest and a festival of sex fetishes? Please, be patient while I explain.

A year earlier, Dan (Vince Vaughn) quit his employment and set up a new company employing septuagenarian co-worker Timothy (Tom Wilkinson) and early-twenties-going-on-early-teens Mike (Dave Franco). Today’s deal aims to corner the world market for swarf, the waste produced from drilling holes in metal. Timothy whose wife resembles a coin-operated fridge longs to enjoy carnality with a like-minded woman. Mike is a virgin. They both yearn to experience the wheelbarrow position.

Vince Vaughn has made acceptable movies playing the leader of a bunch of misfits confronting adversity. “Unfinished Business” fails the acceptability test. Not because of nudity or sexual frankness trying to deal equally with both genders, but for that bête-noir of so much Hollywood comedy, inability to deliver fully-formed and functional humour. Its closest approach to that standard is when Dan and Nick Frost, playing Bill, an overweight and frustrated corporate gopher, walk along from a gay bar and Bill unloads his misery.

Director Ken Scott and writer Steve Conrad are the guilty parties responsible for the film’s failure to make the grade.

At Hoyts, Capitol 6, Dendy and Limelight