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The Internship
| Released |
3 July 2013 |
| Director |
Shawn Levy |
Starring
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Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, Rose Byrne, Aasif Mandvi, Max Minghella, Josh Brener, Dylan O'Brien |
| Writer(s) |
Vince Vaughn, Jared Stern |
| Producer(s) |
Shawn Levy, Vince Vaughn |
| Origin |
United States |
| Running Time |
120 minutes |
| Genre |
Comedy |
| Rating |
12A |
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No Experience Required.
Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson have an undeniable chemistry together – most evident in Wedding Crashers – but about five minutes into The Internship this buddy act all becomes a bit much.
The problem is that they are too good at playing best friends (and since they are mates in real life, it probably isn’t much of an act at all). This means that watching them is a bit like sitting on the sidelines of an alienating conversation, not knowing fully what is going on because you don’t get the in-jokes or the references, so you wait desperately for your chance to steer the conversation away from buddy-land and back to familiar turf. Sitting through The Internship is basically ninety minutes of this, and little else.
The trite buddy act would be less of a problem if there was an actual film going on around the duo, but there isn’t. Vaughn and Wilson play a team of travelling salesmen made redundant by changing times, who suddenly find themselves searching for work in a world they know nothing about. Despite having no qualifications bar an ability to bluff their way through an interview, the pair land an internship with Google.
What follows is a bit like Old School mashed up with The Big Bang Theory. The worldly salesmen teach a bunch of socially awkward nerds how to let their hair down and party, while at the same time learning about the strange new world of the internet. Practically every story beat is dripping with predictable cliché, while the entire supporting cast consists of a series of walking memes rather than actual characters.
The choice of Google as the company for the titular internship is perhaps more telling than the filmmakers intended. There is after all every indication that the search engine was responsible for almost all of the plot, jokes and characters of the piece.
The Internship is obviously the product of people who see Vaughan and Wilson as the everyman, and to whom this new generation of tech-savvy youth is a strange prospect. But this generation is also their main demographic, so they need to make films for them. The script of the film is probably the result of a quick internet search and little else – with all of the humour and pop-culture references nothing more than an attempt to fit in with the kids.
The result is a film that obviously condescends to its audience, and has no conception of the world it actually depicts. It probably would have been a much better film if the studio had just let their interns make it.
- Bernard O’Rourke |
