The University Daily Kansan
Monday, June 10, 2013
Page 9
'The Internship' works overtime for laughs
Eight years after their uproarious "Wedding Crashers" proved that R-rated comedies could still score at the box office, the once-dependable Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson have reunited for "The Internship," a middling generational comedy that doubles as an alarmingly shameless two-hour infomercial about how nifty it might be to work for Google. In fact, director Shawn Levy's newest film may well represent the troubling future of big screen product placement: a movie where the characters, plot and setting are little more than the blunted utensils of a corporate giant bent on improved brand management. After all, if a company can be considered a person, why can't it be a movie star?
When their shiftless boss (John Goodman) declares bankruptcy to cover his early retirement to Florida, unemployed designer-watch salesmen Billy (Vaughn) and Nick (Wilson) are forced to reenter the job market with nothing to offer but their own motor-mouthed enthusiasm and a supposedly hilarious lack of familiarity with newfanged dooickeys like webcams, Harry Potter and the word "online" (all of which have been around since at least the 1990s). A combination of quick thinking and dumb luck eventually lands the duo in Google's summer internship program, a "mental Hunger Games" that wastes no time in supplying them with the requisite team of freaks and geeks to learn from and ultimately rearhead.
Vaughn and Wilson's "Wedding Crashers" chemistry remains largely intact, even as it rails against the labored blandness of the film's PG-13 rating. It's their individual sitticks that seem sadly played out at this point. Wilson, whose surfer-savant delivery and hangdog mannerisms have allowed him to essentially play the same character over and over again ("The Royal Tenenbaums" and "Midnight in Paris" being two rare and wonderful exceptions), looks visibly exhausted at being asked to once again summon the aw-shucks grin when courting an impossibly attractive workaholic (Rose Byrne).
Vaughn, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jared Stern, certainly hasn't done himself any favors by saddling Billy with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of 1980s pop culture analogies. The first "Flashdance" reference, delivered in the midst of a team-building exercise disguised as a real-world Quidditch match, is admittedly funny. The others grate harder than frozen cheese.
The younger interns, including a snarky texting addict (Dylan O'Brien) and a sexually repressed geek girl (Tiya Sircar), are all one-note variations of the millennial stereotype: entitled, tech-savvy and deeply insecure about themselves and their future. Aside from all-too-brief cameos from the likes of Will Ferrell and Rob Riggle, the one memorable presence is Josh Brener ("The Big Bang Theory") as Lyle, the put-upon team manager who proudly sticks up for his middle-aged charges.
For better or worse, though, the real star of "The Internship" is Google itself, who apparently didn't have to pay 20th Century Fox one red cent to produce a movie that could easily be mistaken for a feature-length advertisement. Company executives did exercise a degree of creative control, however, when they reportedly requested the excision of a scene that called for the destruction of one of their experimental self-driving cars. Their beautiful Mountain View, Calif. headquarters is likewise depicted as a spotless technocratic wonderland, combining the finer points of a college campus, a theme park and an alien mother ship. I was honestly amazed when the film's end credits didn't include a link to the Google Jobs webpage. Too subtle I guess.
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Unemployed salesmen Billy (Vince Vaughn) and Nick (Owen Wilson) compete for a job at Google in Shawn Levy's comedy "The Internship."