The Internship
It would be very easy to just blankly hate on this film. It's a movie about Google starring, love him or hate him jabber mouth giant, Vince Vaughn for fuck's sake! How much fun would it be to just indiscriminately rail on this mediocre, run-of-the-mill, quite-funny-in-places, lads comedy?
The thing of it is, though, it's ok. It'll do. It could've been a billion times worse.
Vaughn has forever lost the rapid-fire-funny charm that he displayed in Dodgeball or Old School, where you'd be forgiven for mistaking him as Bill Murray's slightly more talkative and enthusiastic successor but The Internship, like it's leading two characters, is just so full of positivity and some occasionally very funny lines that you can almost see past the mundane, formulaic, Googleness of it all. It also features some actors you probably like and a couple of actually inspired and pretty hilarious scenes.
Wilson is a mystery to me though, so good and full of nuance and depth in Wes Anderson films and then just so cheery but ultimately weak and bland in everything else. In this he is, again, the chipper foil to Vaughn's often-annoying motor mouth and, of course, has a generic and pointless romance with a random woman Vaughn, also the screenwriter, forgot to write a real personality for.
There are times, sadly more frequent than I would've liked, that the Vaughn/Wilson schtick becomes just teeth-grindingly grating. You want to smack them, tell them to breathe and go again.
The Google setting is, on face value, a big old advert for all the services the primary coloured company provides, with a side helping of 'aren't we a swell place to work and aren't we making the world a better place' type crap which, ultimately, comes off a little creepy and simplistic, especially for those of us who grew up on Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka. We know every seemingly joyous place has a dark, weird core that is not to be fully trusted.
Also, as positive as it attempts to present things with it's green, red and yellow bikes, ping pong tables and free pudding for all, laid back hipster/geek chic attitude, somewhere in my soul it scares the piss out of me that this is someone's idea of the way things should work.
All that said, stick it to the back of your mind as much as you can, switch most of your brain off and enjoy the misfits over come adversity, recycled from Revenge of the Nerds, plot line sprinkled with some ok comedy.
Worth a single viewing.
5 out of 10 overly advertised salads.
The thing of it is, though, it's ok. It'll do. It could've been a billion times worse.
Vaughn has forever lost the rapid-fire-funny charm that he displayed in Dodgeball or Old School, where you'd be forgiven for mistaking him as Bill Murray's slightly more talkative and enthusiastic successor but The Internship, like it's leading two characters, is just so full of positivity and some occasionally very funny lines that you can almost see past the mundane, formulaic, Googleness of it all. It also features some actors you probably like and a couple of actually inspired and pretty hilarious scenes.
Wilson is a mystery to me though, so good and full of nuance and depth in Wes Anderson films and then just so cheery but ultimately weak and bland in everything else. In this he is, again, the chipper foil to Vaughn's often-annoying motor mouth and, of course, has a generic and pointless romance with a random woman Vaughn, also the screenwriter, forgot to write a real personality for.
There are times, sadly more frequent than I would've liked, that the Vaughn/Wilson schtick becomes just teeth-grindingly grating. You want to smack them, tell them to breathe and go again.
The Google setting is, on face value, a big old advert for all the services the primary coloured company provides, with a side helping of 'aren't we a swell place to work and aren't we making the world a better place' type crap which, ultimately, comes off a little creepy and simplistic, especially for those of us who grew up on Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka. We know every seemingly joyous place has a dark, weird core that is not to be fully trusted.
Also, as positive as it attempts to present things with it's green, red and yellow bikes, ping pong tables and free pudding for all, laid back hipster/geek chic attitude, somewhere in my soul it scares the piss out of me that this is someone's idea of the way things should work.
All that said, stick it to the back of your mind as much as you can, switch most of your brain off and enjoy the misfits over come adversity, recycled from Revenge of the Nerds, plot line sprinkled with some ok comedy.
Worth a single viewing.
5 out of 10 overly advertised salads.