The Internship – Movie Review
By Anne Brodie Jun 10, 2013, 0:30 GMT
Two salesmen whose careers have been torpedoed by the digital age find their way into a coveted internship at Google, where they must compete with a group of young, tech-savvy geniuses for a shot at employment ...more
Considering it is a shameless two hour commercial for Google Ad Space, The Internship goes way out of its way to shill for the tech giant on every Google note possible. Set inside the Google campus in San Francisco, praising every aspect of the company, suggesting ways to increase your market share through Google ads, and creating a twenty-something friendly Harry Potter / Hunger Games-esque theme park for grown Google employees reaches maximum load.
Thing is, the Google world is bright and shiny and you really want to relax into it, but those rebel stirrings are never far from the surface and in the end you want to explode with indignation.It makes hay from the generation gap circa 2013, the tech kids and the Luddite adults producing some laughs. No one comes out clean in this battle of the olds and youngs, considering the depth of the malice and hostility directed towards the adults. The adults in this case, the wedding crashers themselves, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, are likeable and witty enough but they are the underdogs in a vast campus of watchless young people who won’t have anything to do with them. I don’t blame them. They are of parental age.
Wilson and Vaughn apply for internships with Google when they lose their real world sales jobs. They were good at sales, having natural banter, easy-going confidence and a basic understanding of human psychology. But theirs is a world of the past. The internet rules and old school real world stuff doesn’t apply, especially at Google. (Or does it? Hmmm.)
They have to compete with a hundred eager college students for the internship posts. They create a team and strategize winning challenges with varying degrees of success. The team is comprised of types, albeit diverse types and the situations are predictable but there are some laughs to be had in the fish out of water milieu. Facing fresh faced, raised-on-tech, brainy school kids isn’t easy. One especially nasty Brit (Max Minghella) regularly berates them for being old and out of it; he is insufferable but he is also the most likely to succeed and beat them.
The boys more or less teach themselves the internet bring their strengths to the competition, likeability and people skills which the techies lack, and offer the best advice, the kernel key to the meaning of the film, for us all to look up from the screens and see the world.
The films charming and funny at times, and the leads are warm, cuddly friends, but the Google-ness of it all is a tough sell. It would never have flown in the past, but maybe the world is so indelibly branded that the filmmakers thought this would go by unnoticed. It won’t. At least they have the wedding crashers there to give us the warm fuzzies.
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35mm comedy
Written by Vince Vaughn and Jared Stern
Directed by Shawn Levy
Opens: In Theatres Now
Runtime: 119 minutes
MPAA: PG
Country: USA
Language: English
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