The Internship

The cinema paying public has grown weary of the antics of Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson over the past few years, so much so that the satirical website The Onion came up with one of the quotes of the year when it described that the The Internship was “…poised to be the biggest comedy of 2005”. Throw in the fact this re-teams Vaughn with his The Watch director Shawn Levy and I’ll understand anyone’s reticence to give this a chance. However, this isn’t actually all that bad and it does have a surprising amount of heart. However, there’s little originality in the script which concerns recently laid off watch salesmen Vaughn and Wilson gaining an internship at Google and their struggle to complete the course due to their lack of knowledge of modern culture and social norms. It’s as standard as you’d expect, including the now de rigueur unsubtle mixture of diverse students that only ever appear in US movies and sit-coms. What saves this from being a complete disaster is that the grossness for the theatrical release has clearly been reigned in, which makes this a more appealing watch than you would originally have thought. Many brick-bats have been thrown at the film for its portrayal of Google as a utopian employees paradise. Well, duh. What did you expect? At least the film is honest in its approach to using the company as a means to an end. Though I understand how the combination of Vaughn, Owen, Levy and Google could have people thinking the apocalypse has come early. Rating: 5/10.