Thursday, June 13, 2013

The Internship - 2 stars

The Internship reunited Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson 8 years after the hilarious Wedding Crashers.  This time, they play out of work watch salesman.  Since they have no skills, and apparently there are no more jobs for salesmen, their best plan is to try and become interns at Google.

This is a very predictable story that I've seen many times before.  The characters are established as losers right away.  Vaughn is being dumped by his girlfriend, and the only job Wilson can find is working for his sister's jerk of a boyfriend, played by Will Ferrell in his least funny cameo ever.  They don't know computers and they don't fit in with the other interns.  But if they want to succeed, they will have to overcome these obstacles.  By the end of the movie, they and their team of interns will have become better people.

In order for the story to work, the characters have to be computer illiterate.  But it's hard to believe than these guys are this dumb.  They have their interview in a google hangout, and they act like they have never seen a webcam before.  They think they have to shout into the mic to be heard.  And why are they interviewing together anyway?

When all the intern are put into teams, they are teamed up with the misfits (who actually seem pretty smart, and would have no trouble finding a team in real life).  Their first challenge is to find a bug in a program.  Vaughn and Wilson have no idea what this means.  Instead of shutting up and letting the computer experts try to figure it out, they won't shut up.  They start brainstorming, coming up with complete nonsense.  It's pretty annoying.  And even though I wouldn't expect them to be familiar with X-Men comics, there have been several highly successful X-Men movies.  The idea that neither of them would have any idea who Professor Charles Xavier is seems kind of far fetched.

Because this is that type of movie, once the team starts to work together, everything starts going their way.  Even though these guys knew less about computers than my 80 year old grandmother, after one night of studying they can handle any type of tech support call.  They become experts by osmosis, it seems.

I could overlook all these flaws of the movie if it were funnier.  But this material just seems tired.  Vaughn and Wilson don't have the creative energy they had in Wedding Crashers.  Maybe a better director could have helped them improvise some better lines.  They are playing the same characters they have played many times before.  And from the moment Wilson meets the lady executive, you know exactly how that romance is going to play out.

I think I laughed maybe 5 times in the entire movie.  The most creative part was the end credits, which must have been designed by Google. 

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