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Directed by: Shawn Levy 
Written by: Vince Vaughn, Jared Stern
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| Tookey's Review |
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| Mixed Reviews |
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| Cast |
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| Released: |
2013 |
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| Genre: |
COMEDY
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
119 |
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Don’t pay ‘em.
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Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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Vince Vaughn clearly isn’t content with having starred in many of the past decade’s worst comedies. He’s started to write and produce them.
With his sixth turkey in as many years, he has achieved the apparently impossible feat of making a movie that is even worse than the last five: Fred Claus, Four Christmases, Couples Retreat, The Dilemma and The Watch.
The Internship is an eye-poppingly moronic, laugh-free comedy in which Vaughn(pictured right) and Owen Wilson (left) play middle-aged salesmen who are thrown out of work but somehow manage to get themselves picked to be interns at Google.
This most controversial of multinational corporations is portrayed, without any semblance of irony, as an all-American Garden of Eden. Tax-avoidance, privacy and anti-trust issues are studiously ignored, as is the morality of lengthy internships. This must be the cinema’s longest, most sycophantic piece of product placement ever.
The movie begins as lazily as it means to go on, with the two leading characters singing along to pop music in their car – about the zillionth comedy to do this since Wayne’s World. The only point of interest is that Vaughn is clearly tone-deaf, a quality that extends to the rest of his performance.
After a couple of dismally unfunny cameos by John Goodman and Will Ferrell, who I hope were unpaid, our middle-aged heroes are implausibly recruited to Google internships despite their total lack of computer skills or bluffing ability.
They team up with a few other misfits to make up a team of underdogs competing for automatic jobs with the world’s wisest employer. Leader of the bad guys is Max Minghella, who is not only arrogant and a bully, but British. Guess who comes out on top.
The film is depressing on numerous levels. For a start, it seems to have been written decades ago. Our heroes are in their early forties, at most, but they are so unfamiliar with computers and the internet they might as well be centenarians.
Vaughn and Wilson are commended for handing out life-lessons on the importance of teamwork, yet Vaughn’s behaviour often seems egotistical and sleazy in the extreme.
The heroes’ big idea of teaching their younger friends to work together is to take them to a lap-dancing club. One of them describes this as “the best night of my life”. In the crazy world of Hollywood, this is having a good influence.
But it’s the lack of anything resembling humour that sinks the film. And it lasts a suicidally long two hours.
The high point is when a minor character nails precisely what’s been wrong with every Vaughn performance of the last seven years: “You’re saying a lot of words really, really fast, which mean nothing!”
The movie’s at its toe-curling worst when it attempts to pair off Owen Wilson with Rose Byrne, as a high-flying Google executive. Despite their physical attractions, they have the sexual chemistry of Theresa May and Abu Qatada. These sequences are directed by Shawn Levy (whose previous insults to cinema include Just Married, Cheaper by the Dozen and the horrible Steve Martin remake of The Pink Panther) in his, and everyone else’s, sleep
It is clear from the film that Google prides itself on being innovative, hard-working and super-intelligent. How weird, then, that it has chosen to associate itself with a film that is the polar opposite. Unintentionally, it’s an excellent advertisement for Yahoo, Firefox and Bing.
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