Directed by: Shawn Levy
Starring: Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, Rose Byrne
The Internship had ingredients to work as a poignant comedy, but the results are tepid. Vaughn (who co-wrote the screenplay) and Wilson try hard to elevate this dreck, but I expected a film about unemployed fortysomethings competing against technologically superior college grads for a Google internship to have more bite. Instead, we are forced to settle for Vaughn and Wilson using their people skills to help a team of awkward nerds realize their potential and win the internship. It's underwhelming and flat.
The Internship opens with watch salesmen Billy and Nicky (Vaughn and Wilson) trying to close a major client over dinner. The client informs them before their boss does that their company closed and the two are out of a job. Nicky takes a job with his sister's boyfriend (Will Ferrell-unbilled) as a mattress salesman. Ferrell cameoed in Wedding Crashers and was a lot funnier there. I knew I was in for a long movie when his cameo here resulted in zero laughs.
Billy and Nicky apply for an internship at Google and interview via webcam with their prospective employers. This scene flies off the rails so badly that I wished Google would've turned them down on the spot and thus making the film only 20 minutes long. But alas, the two knuckleheads are hired because someone Sees Something In Them. Google's headquarters are complete with free food, a slide which connects floors, and lots of colors. It looks like a day care center gone berserk. Maybe the real Google headquarters is set up like this, but I hope not.
At Google, interns divide up into teams and attempt to work their way into a job there. Billy and Nicky are regarded as dinosaurs and are left with other undesirables to form a team that reminded me of an intern Land Of Misfit Toys. Of course, the team doesn't gel at first because the techno nerds think little of Billy and Nicky, but then the team comes together and learns to Respect and Trust Each Other. This starts during a Quiddich game. Yes, a Quiddich game, a la Harry Potter but without the flying around on brooms. Instead the participants have to run with the brooms between their legs. The team truly unites during a drunken night at a local strip club, which must know it is in a PG-13 rated film and the dancers dress appropriately. In other words, they are attired in entirely too much clothing.
The Internship then makes the fatal mistake of becoming earnest and forthright when it should be edgier. Nicky gains a love interest, a workaholic Google executive named Dana (Byrne), who predictably rejects his early advances and then, just when the script requires it, she goes on a date with him and falls in love. There is no chemistry between the two even though both are likable enough. Billy and Nicky give at least four peptalks, either to the team or to each other, about going for your dreams, taking risks, giving it your all, yada, yada, yada. Am I watching a comedy or a Tony Robbins motivational speech?
Wilson and Vaughn worked together before in Starsky and Hutch and Wedding Crashers, two comedies which made me laugh a lot more than The Internship. For all of the lip service given to taking risks in The Internship, it's amazing the filmmakers didn't follow its own advice. However, I thought the team's idea for a phone app wasn't so bad. The app asks you a difficult question you must answer correctly before you send a drunken text you may regret. How the phone knows your text is being sent while in a drunken state I don't know, but I should've been made to correctly answer a difficult question before I was allowed to plunk down $10.00 for this movie.
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