The Internship
Shawn Levy
The story: Struggling salesmen Billy McMahon (Vince Vaughn) and Nick Campbell (Owen Wilson) decide to apply for internships at tech giant Google. There, they find themselves up against eager, tech-savvy college-age kids. In order to come out tops in the competitive programme, and thus land actual jobs, the two men have to win the respect of their much younger teammates.

The last time Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson teamed up, everyone was happy. Wedding Crashers (2005) coasted by on the chemistry between its two leads, reviews were positive and the comedy was a hit at the box office.
The dynamics of the relationship between the buddies strike a familiar note here. Wilson is laidback and easygoing, Vaughn more animated and effortlessly chatty – the kind of people you want to hang around and maybe crash a party or two with.
Too bad they did not pick a better vehicle for their comeback ride. Vaughn is partly culpable since he co-wrote the script.
The entire set-up just feels dishonest. Despite not knowing their html from their http, Billy and Nick manage to rally their team together. They accomplish this with inspirational speechifying from Billy referencing the feel-good movie Flashdance (1983). Score one for the tech dinosaurs.
The comedy 21 And Over (2013) was all about drunken shenanigans, but at least it had no pretensions about being more than that.
In The Internship, anyone who is not Billy or Nick is pretty much a one-note character. From the weird home-schooled guy (Tobit Raphael) to the geek who is too cool to connect with the rest of the world (Dylan O’Brien), they are a collection of walking cliches.
The group also bond over an inhibition-loosening visit to the local strip joint. This turn is particularly dispiriting considering that one of the team members is a woman (Tiya Sircar). But, hey, as long as her male teammates are having fun boozing it up and getting lap dances, it is all good.
Director Shawn Levy (Real Steel, 2011) does not do much with the predictable material and lets it play out to its unsurprising ending.
Nick even gets to have a love interest (Rose Byrne), a Google employee who eventually succumbs to his charm.
The biggest winner in the film has to be Google, as the movie duly notes that it was ranked the best place to work. And the scenes of the everything- here-is-free cafeteria and the cosy sleep-pods corner almost give it the feel of a corporate video.
With Apple getting its turn on the big screen in the recent biopic Jobs (2013), can it be long before Microsoft: The Movie comes along?
(ST)