The Internship: Movie Review

The Internship: Movie Review

Cast: Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Rose Byrne, Max Minghella, Aasif Mandvhi
Director: Shawn Levy

Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn reunite after 2005 smash hit Wedding Crashers in this piece which is more squarely aimed at a wider audience.

This time the pair play Nick and Billy respectively, a pair of successful, gift of the gab watch salesmen who find their jobs gone after their company is shut down. So, with nowhere to go, Billy finds a chance for them to be part of an internship programme at Google.

But as they are by far the oldest people on the course, they stick out like a sore thumb - and when they're teamed up with the less successful rejects to fight it out in a mental "Hunger Games" quest for a job at Google, it looks like they're out of their league....

The Internship movie is a perfectly affable piece, which flounders on charting a course through predictable and safe waters without delivering too many laughs at all.

It just gets by on the charm, charisma and chemistry of its two leads but it offers nothing but pleasant life lessons as the two fish out of water, washed up ex-salesmen try to negotiate their internship at the corporate wonder that is Google. 

It's curiously flat though, proffering up only a few Lols here and there and most of them peddling the stereotypes and tropes you'd expect in a predictable piece like this. There's the inept older duo who have wordly skills and savvy where techno lets them down; the must-do-well Asian student; the aloof hipster teen boy and girl who are lacking social finesse but clearly should be together and the mentor who's an outcast at Google - it's the digital equivalent of The Breakfast Club. Throw into that mix a love interest in the form of Rose Byrne who's wrapped up in her work life and you've got all the ingredients of an after school special waiting to happen. A cameo from Will Ferrell brings a few laughs early on but they're soon gone.

And yet, with the riffing of the relationship between Billy and Nick (and consequently Vaughn and Wilson), there's maybe enough good will to propel you through the overlong inevitable mush that's on the way. It's a walking ad for corporate Google, with every available opportunity taken to peddle the wonders of their services, the hipster like nature of their workplace and the general happiness (or "Googliness" as it's called in the film) of working for the web giant.

There are a few messages about how the American Dream's changed for the youth today, how cynicism can be overcome, how we still have to learn from the older generation who go out there and get stuff done without the wonders of modern technology, that there's still a place for teamwork within the corporate mainframe and that life's lessons have to be learnt no matter what age you are. But it's all so warm, fuzzy and sentimental that ultimately it's ever so cloying and verging on the insufferable. 

Despite a few nods to geek culture and a sequence in a nightclub which brings a few laughs, The Internship movie is a schmaltzy and unchallenging solid feel-good "comedy" with an earnest heart but a lack of continual humour and without any real byte.

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