Title: The Internship
20th Century Fox
Director: Shawn Levy
Screenwriter: Vince Vaughn, Jared Stern, story by Vince Vaughn
Cast: Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, John Goodman, Rose Byrne, Dylan O’Brien, JoAnna Garcia Swisher, Chuti Tiu, B.J. Novak
Screened at: NYC, AMC Empire, 6/4/13
Opens: June 7, 2013
More sentimental than comic, “The Internship” is not the film to see if you’re looking for belly-laughs, but succeeds marginally with the motif that mature adults have something to teach recent college grads and the twenty-somethings something to offer the older folks. Teaming up “Wedding Crashers” Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn once again, Shawn Levy’s movie affords us the actual scene embracing the Google culture—the free food, the nap-pods, the general gung-ho spirits of the youthful geeks who are likely to think of their employment as not really work but as play time for which they can’t believe they’re paid.
Much of the fun revolves around a group of misfits the likes of whom you’ve probably seen in many similar comedies. Billy (Vince Vaughn) and Nick (Owen Wilson) are crackerjack salesmen whose company has just closed down since, as explained by their boss (John Goodman), people do not count any more. Consumers would rather surf the web and get the merchandise delivered to them than to speak with live people, the idea being that you can learn more about a product by patiently looking at a number of companies’ offerings at home without pressure. Brick-and-mortar structures are implicitly dinosaurs in this brave new world.
Billy and Nick sign on to an internship program at Google despite their lack of computer know-how and notwithstanding their advanced age when compared with others who are trying to land an offer of employment. Their aim is to win a competition against others, knowing that only five percent of summer interns will be offered regular jobs. The interns have five minutes to find team-mates under the rules given by the program’s head (Aasif Mandvi) who hints throughout that Billy and Nick’s team have a snowball’s chance in hell of beating the completion. We in the audience are rooting for a team that are underdogs in every way, since in addition to the relative old-timers themselves, Billy and Nick’s group is composed of the worst misfits: a fellow who has been browbeat by his mother, one who can’t get his eyes away from his I-phone, a young woman who never had a boyfriend despite her good looks, and a Google employee who needs the loosening up that only the team’s visit to a strip joint can bring.
A romance between Nick and a Google employee (Rose Byrne) is shoehorned into the plot, though the pair are both aware that dating other employees is forbidden. All in all the comedy is unchallenging, the sentiment is old-hat.
Rated PG-13. 119 minutes © 2013 by Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – C
Acting – B
Technical – B
Overall – C+
