Internship, The (2013)
THE SCOOP
Director: Shawn Levy
Cast: Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, Rose Byrne
Plot: 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.
Genre: Comedy
Awards: -
Runtime: 119min
Rating: PG13 for sexuality, some crude humor, partying and language.
IN RETROSPECT (Guest Review by Raymond Tan)
Do we need a movie that’s little more than a two-hour
paean to Google? Probably not, but that didn’t
stop director Shawn Levy and writers Vince Vaugn and Jared Stern from making The Internship, a movie that is long on
product placement and short on actual humour, heart and creativity.
There are more than a few decent ideas contained in the
movie. As the movie opens, Bill (Vaughn)
and Nick (Owen Wilson), buddies who both sell watches for the same company, are
retrenched. These two have few skills. They are blessed with a silver tongue, and
little else. But worst of their
inadequacies has to be their absolute cluelessness regarding anything
technology related. They are, as their
boss calls them, “dinosaurs”.
The movie could have been a portrait of two working-class
Gen X-ers forced to reckon with changing economic forces. Making comedy out of something sad or
depressing can be cathartic. But the problem is that the film isn’t funny – I
laughed maybe five times, maximum. Worse
still, the film ends up trivializing all the struggles that our two goofballs
have.
Desperate for a job, our lovable losers decide to apply
for an internship at Google, and so technologically backward are they, they
have to do their online interview via a computer at the library. Their excuse is that they don’t have a webcam
at home; their interviewers gamely buy it.
In reality, Google’s HR execs would nary
bat an eyelid at their applications much less even bother conducting an online
interview with them. Bill, apparently
living in the prehistoric age, doesn’t know what “online” means. He calls that “on the line”. Where has he been living the past 10 years? In a cave?
Still, by a strange turn of luck, they end up in the
Google internship programme. Within the
first hour of orientation, internship applicants have to form groups to compete
against each other; the winning group
scores an internship with the internet titans. These two end up forming a group with a bunch
of oddball nerds (Dylan O’Brien,
Tobit Raphael, Tiya Sircar), and they have to overcome the odds to
succeed in claiming the prize. Sounds
familiar?
Had the filmmakers had guts to take the premise through
and see Nick and Bill truly struggling to survive in a brave new world – one in
which they have to deal with not only prejudice from other applicants, but a
stark awareness their own expendability – the movie could have been an
interesting exploration of middle-age struggles. Instead, the filmmakers are quick to affirm Nick
and Bill’s worth, presenting them as Cool Bros who will help their teammates
come out of their shell. Yes, our
tech-retard leading pair may be dumb, but their street smarts make up for it
all!
In an offensive turn of events, these two decide they have to school their teammates in the ways of the world (yes, because computer whizzes are all repressed sociopaths lacking in life experience!) and bring them to a club, where said teammates get drunk, fraternize with pole-dancers and get into fights, and after which Bill and Nick proceed to joke about the outing with their teammates.
Did it ever occur to the filmmakers that computer whizzes
don’t do shit like that not because they’re cloistered, sheltered sociopaths,
but because they’re too smart to waste their lives? Instead, they present the entire incident as a
ritual by which these nerds gain enlightenment or something. It’s condescending and offensive.
Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson have a winsome charm and an
easy comic-chemistry between them. But charisma
only takes a movie so far, and the film’s fatal error is its reliance on
charisma and neglect of actual writing. By
the end, one realizes that while Vaughn and Wilson are tremendously likable,
the real star is of the film is undoubtedly Google.
Rating: 2.5 stars
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