There are a lot of reasons not to want to see The Internship. It’s basically one big obnoxious commercial for Google, complete with a name drop and demonstration of basically every product that they make. Its stars, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, are both getting a little long in the tooth to keep playing rascally underdog characters, and have been seeing increasingly diminishing returns every time they’ve stepped back into these familiar roles in recent years. And even from just watching its ads, it was clear that this just isn’t a project that has a strong comedic voice behind it. As a matter of fact, it was directed by Shawn Levy, who’s mostly known for making generic stuff like the Night at the Museum movies and Date Night, and it comes from a script largely credited to Vaughn himself, who has only had writing credits on tripe like The Break-Up and Couples Retreat so far. All signs point toward The Internship being one of the worst movies of the year.
In reality it isn’t all that bad though. It’s true that it gets disgusting how much of a 119 minute commercial it is for Google products. It’s true that old men Vaughn and Wilson look ridiculous playing a couple of out of work salesmen who become unpaid interns with one of the hottest tech companies in the world. It’s true that the script the cast was working from doesn’t contain many big laughs at all, and doesn’t even bother to explain how two people who aren’t qualified to work at a tech company might be given interviews for the highly sought-after position in the first place. But The Internship still isn’t inept and awful on the level you might be imagining. It’s kind of just lazy and lame.
It’s lazy in that you can see all of the implausible romantic connections and underdog-makes-good plot advancements the story makes coming a mile away, and they’re offered up with no twist on the standard formula whatsoever. It’s lame because it wastes far too much time delivering what are supposed to be stirring speeches and achieving moments of growth for side characters who were only loosely sketched in the first place, and the schmaltz always feel more obligatory than it does genuine. Vaughn and Wilson both remain charming personalities, however, so they’re still able to deliver the occasional laugh or two, even when working with shoddy material. And the movie does stick to the formula and paint in broad enough strokes that it’s generically inspiring story ends up working on some small level, so long as you don’t ask too much of it. I guess what I’m saying is that The Internship has probably been unfairly maligned as more of a a total misfire than it really is, solely because of its annoying ad campaign, but it isn’t actually a total misfire at all—it’s just enough of one that there’s no reason for you to waste any time seeing it.
