Second Opinion – The Internship (2013)

The Internship, 2013.

Directed by Shawn Levy.
Starring Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, Rose Byrne, Aasif Mandvi, Max Minghella, Josh Brener, and Dylan O’Brien.

SYNOPSIS:

Two salesmen whose careers have been torpedoed by the digital age find their way into a coveted internship at Google, where they must compete with a group of young, tech-savvy geniuses for a shot at employment.

Annoyingly, the best joke to made about The Internship has already been written by The Onion stating that the movie is ‘posied to be the biggest comedy of 2005’. But it does seem strange to be sitting here in the middle of 2013 writing a review about a movie in which Vince Vaugnhn and Owen Wilson apply for an internship at Google and they make jokes about Quidditch and Instagram.

Wilson and Vaughn play two salesmen who get let go by their boss (played by John Goodman, who has now featured in two rubbish comedies this year) and have to apply for an internship at Google, even though they know nothing about computers or the Internet. In order to get the jobs at the end of the internship, they have to win a series of games set up by Google bosses, which means our unlikely heroes have to team up with a group of misfits who ‘don’t stand a chance of winning’. Can the underdogs defeat the odds and blah blah blah…

The biggest problem with the The Internship is not just that it feels 8 years too late to be culturally relevant, but that it’s so incredibly bland and formulaic. From the moment the movie starts you can telegraph where it’s heading with pinpoint precision. But unlike Dodgeball or Wedding Crashers however, The Internships doesn’t sparkle with likeable characters and it simply isn’t funny. The supporting characters (who themselves are a bunch of tokens) try their best to make Vaughn and Wilson’s lazy performances watchable but it just isn’t enough.

The other problem that The Internship has is that it doesn’t have a good enough antagonist to make you root for the underdogs. Vaughn plays up to the dry humour standards he set in Dodgeball, only he doesn’t have Ben Stiller’s wacky White Goodman to play off. The same can be said for Wilson who is doing his usual ‘laid back Southern drawl’ schtick, but doesn’t have the utterly hateful Sack Lodge to fight against to help make him likeable. Instead we’re given a yawn-enducing, paint-by-numbers “villain” in the form of Graham played by Max Minghella. This boring and lazy-written character does nothing but highlight just how out of of touch The Internship is. He picks his team because they can help him win as opposed to work together, he hates the main characters because they’re old and he bullies the fat kid. To call him a cliché is an insult to clichés.

But it’s not like the movie would be any better if he was a more interesting bad guy. Vaughn and Wilson put in zero effort as they rattle off their predictable lines that are meant to make the Internet-savy audience laugh. They’re in the their 40s so they don’t know what Instagram is, that’s funny right? Vaughn says “on the line” instead of “online”, that’s funny right? They play Quidditch, that was in Harry Potter so it must be funny right?