The Internship

 

It was not long into The Internship that my heart started to feel heavy.  Almost from the start, I had the sinking feeling that this was going to be a rather generic comedy.  I settled into my seat, not wanting to let early impressions sway me, and hoped that the movie would start to pick up.  It never did.  You know a movie is moving too slowly for you when it feels like over an hour has passed, and you check your watch, only to see that it's been 40 minutes.  An even worse sign that the movie isn't working is when you find yourself checking your watch again just five minutes later.

This is a hopelessly uninspired film that doesn't have a single laugh, creative idea, or bit of thought behind it.  It exists solely to waste the talents of Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, who worked well together in Wedding Crashers, but here are saddled with characters who are total non-entities.  Funny thing is, Vaughn co-wrote the script.  He produced it, also.  Why purposely write something so bland and safe for yourself?  If you're going to make a comedy, why not go for broke?  Instead, Vaughn and writing partner Jared Stern have essentially given us an adult movie made up entirely out of high school comedy cliches.  That's right, the movie is set in the adult world, but it gives us all the usual cliches we expect in a teen comedy - The geeky outcasts who learn to stand up for themselves, the overconfident bully, the seemingly unobtainable hot girl who actually has a soft spot for one of the geeky guys, and the stern authority figure who seems to be against the outcasts, but is secretly in their corner the entire time.  The only thing missing is the food fight scene.

Did I mention that this movie is two hours long?  Well, it is.  Does it need to be?  Heck, no!  For an awkward movie like this that never seems to be building any momentum, even 90 minutes would be pushing it.  Having it clock at a full two hours is like a cruel joke on the audience by director Shawn Levy (Real Steel).  Listen to this synopsis, and tell me if you think it sounds like the kind of premise that could fill a movie this long.  Billy (Vaughn) and Nick (Wilson) are best friends and co-workers as salesmen when they learn in the film's opening scene that the company they work for has gone under without them knowing.  With limited skills and even more limited job postings open to them (Nick has a brief stint as a mattress salesman), they eventually are picked to participate in an internship program at Google Headquarters in California.  All of the interns applying for the job are placed in separate teams, though the only two teams that matter to us are the one Billy and Nick are on, and the one led by the resident bully (Max Minghella), who constantly ridicules them.

Naturally, our two heroes find themselves on the team filled with the misfits that no one else wanted.  They include the nerdy team leader Lyle (Josh Brener), the sarcastic and anti-social Stuart (Dylan O'Brien), the shy and home-schooled Yo-Yo (Tophit Raphael), and the lovely Neha (Tiya Sircar), who despite being absolutely beautiful and having a great personality, seemingly has never been able to find a boyfriend.  This character I found particularly hard to believe.  Here is a girl who not only has a Hollywood body many women would kill for, but she is also a Sci-Fi and comic geek, who enjoys cosplaying as Princess Leia in her slave outfit from Return of the Jedi.  Are we supposed to believe that she is an outcast, and none of the other "geeky" guys would want her?  This girl could go on any Sci-Fi-related chatroom, post a photo of herself and list her interests, and find a boyfriend in about five minutes.

It doesn't matter, though.  We don't learn anything about her, or any of these other characters.  They participate in a series of challenges and games to see if they are "Google material".  Too bad we don't get to see much of these challenges, as they're usually brushed aside, or handled in a montage.   The one challenge that we do get to see is the one I couldn't figure out what it had to do with getting a job at Google.  That's the one where the two teams participate in a game of Quidditch.  Yes, the sport from Harry Potter.  It's one of many film references the movie keeps on dropping in its dialogue for no particular reason.  The characters namedrop stuff like Back to the Future, The Terminator, X-Men, and even Flashdance, which becomes the basis of Vince Vaughn's inspirational speech when his team of underdogs are getting down.  None of this is funny, and it simply sounds like the writers dropping references to old movies in an attempt to speak to as wide an audience as possible.

 

The Internship fails in just about every way, even as an extended advertisement for Google which, let's face it, this movie essentially is.  We learn nothing about the company, what it's like working there, and I can't really picture this being successful enough to help increase their brand image.  There are a lot of comedies that fail to be funny.  But to fail at product placement?  Well, that takes a special kind of lack of effort.

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

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