Starbuck movie review & film summary (2012)

Huard plays David, a perpetual screw-up in his early 40's who finds out he is the father of 533 children. See, when he was a young slacker, he made tons of quick cash as a sperm donor—over 600 times. Since he used an alias, Starbuck, 142 of his now-adult offspring are filing a class-action lawsuit to get the sperm bank to divulge their father's true identity. 

The suit couldn't come at a worse time for David, who is ducking violent loan sharks he owes bigtime, whose girlfriend is pregnant and whose job delivering meat for his father's butcher shop is always imperiled by his complete incompetence. Yep, it's one of those movies, the kind of reality-flavored comic fluff Ho'wood once factory-milled for "SNL" alumni every few months, before Judd Apatow took over the market last decade, adding a bigger dash of improvisatory salt.

David emerges as a character who has has been outlawed in movies, a lovable  guileless fuckup. The fashion in popular films has been more along the lines of "As Good As It Gets"-through-"Silver Linings Playbook," where the hero who starts off sour and mentally unstable ends up sloughing off the traumas and disappointments that made him so. 

"Starbuck" is interesting mainly because of its investment in a character who doesn't have to be mean to be interesting. David knows what love is, and that's his problem. He seems to have no concept of time or self-preservation once he gets absorbed in the work of helping somebody whose plight has touched his heart.

Screenwriters Ken Scott and Martin Petit take the safest route through these familiar situations, but director Scott's dynamic staging and tendency to let Huard carry the scenes with screwball aplomb keep us focused on David's universal predicament. Any single man who has found himself suddenly facing the prospect of fatherhood should relate. David's girlfriend knows nothing of his secret Starbuck identity but assumes that he is unfit to raise the one child she knows he's fathered: hers. Unaccomplished and aimless at 42, he seems, in her estimation, certain to go along with her plan to raise the child alone.