Wedding Crashers remains one of the better “frat pack” comedies (does anyone still use that term?), especially since whenever guys like Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson team up it’s usually better than their solo efforts. Vaughn’s last few comedies — such as Couples Retreat, The Dilemma, and The Watch — haven’t been his best, and as far as Wilson’s recent “straight” comedies — like Hall Pass and The Big Year — the less said, the better. So Vaughn and Wilson try to repeat the Wedding Crashers formula in The Internship, even including a small part for Will Ferrell (except this time around it comes at the beginning of the movie, not the end). While it’s not as funny as Wedding Crashers, it’s still really clever and a major back-to-basics move for both.
Vaughn and Wilson are Billy and Nick, who are essentially the same characters they are in Wedding Crashers (except Vaughn gets to be the sappy one during the second act this time around). They are sales representatives for various products until their company closes because their salesmanship seems archaic in the digital age. The fact that the duo is completely blindsided by this is somewhat silly, but just go along with it. Billy discovers that Google has been voted the #1 company to work for in America, so he enrolls himself and Nick in the University of Phoenix (“The Harvard of online schools,” he says) and the two make an effort to get an internship with Google. The odds are obviously stacked against them — especially since they have little experience with computers — as they face off with some of the brightest college students in America to try and win full-time jobs with Google (I didn’t know Google ran it’s internship program like a game show, but let’s just go with that too). However, Billy and Nick prove how much two guys can get out of just being affable and, in the words of fiction’s most famous salesman, “well liked,” especially within a generation that is uncomfortable with social skills.
The pair face hurdles from the get-go, including Graham (Max Minghella), an obnoxious guy with a stuck-up English accent who will do anything to get a job with Google except, of course, be nice to other people. Their intern teammates also have little faith in them. In fact, one of the reasons why The Internship is actually more clever than Wedding Crashers is that it riffs on the obnoxiousness of those who believe sheer intelligence is what a person’s worth is measured by in the age of Google. In this sense, the nerdy/geeky kids who were bullied in high school now become the bullies in college, and for all this endless talk about bullying in the media over the past two years it demonstrates that anyone can be a bully. The script is also very smart with the points it makes about the lack of conversation and social skills of younger generations. One of Billy and Nick’s intern teammates is Stewart (Dylan O’Brien), who spends his life with his face in his phone and postures to make him seem like he’s too cool and too cynical for everyone. I work with a lot of undergrads who fit this description perfectly — interacting with the real world is sadly their weakest point. They obviously can actually learn a lot from Billy and Nick.
One thing to get out of the way here is that The Internship is essentially a nearly two-hour commercial for Google that will annoyingly attempt to convince you that Google is the greatest thing ever invented by humans. I might be dating myself here, but do you remember how The Wizard is a 90 minute commercial for Nintendo? This lays it on even thicker. In fact, I kept thinking what we’ll think about this movie twenty years from now, especially if Google goes the way of other online juggernauts (or “on the line” as Vaughn’s character says) and fades from its current lofty position. Past that, this is a very funny comedy and much better than the last collaboration between screenwriters Vaughn and Jared Stern, The Watch. This is definitely the best comedy director Shawn Levy has made too, unless you’re one of those crazy folks who thinks The Pink Panther remake is better than the original.
There are a few flaws here. The main subplot is that Nick falls in love with one of the Google executives (Rose Byrne), who is one of those workaholic women who have no time for romance straight out of most rom coms (I Don’t Know How She Does It… at Google!). It seems like a leftover plot from another movie and really gets in the way of all the fun. Also, one of Nick and Billy’s teammates is an Asian student named Yo-Yo (Tobit Raphael), who is under strict orders from his mother to work harder than his hardest (“But Mom, that’s impossible” he says). I give Vaughn and Stern credit for getting a few more miles out of the harsh Asian parents stereotype — especially since Yo-Yo is one of the funniest characters in the film — but like the plotline with Rose Byrne you know where this is going. And of course, it’s nice seeing people like John Goodman and Josh Gad (and Ferrell) in small roles, but naturally I wanted to see much more of them.
So while The Internship is not as funny as Wedding Crashers, it’s still a clever movie and a solid PG-13 comedy if you can get past all the silliness. It’s great to see Vaughn and Wilson together again. Let’s hope they keep sticking with good material.
Rating: Vaughn and Wilson make a two-hour Google commercial enjoyable (7/10).
The Internship will be released on June 7.
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