Review: The Internship

by Trevor Kirkendall
★½

Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson reunite in “The Internship,” Google’s big screen commercial. As if a company of that size and scope needs any extra marketing. Summer films typically get a bad rep for their blatant and sometimes obnoxious overuse of product placement. Product placement is pretty much unavoidable in almost any film, but “The Internship” seems to be one gigantic product placement. I can’t see any other reason for its existence other than to serve as a Google recruitment ad.

Billy McMahon (Vaughn) and Nick Campbell (Wilson) are top-notch salesmen, but suddenly they’re both out of work. The owner of the company they work for (John Goodman) has decided to shut down and retire. This leaves Billy and Nick unemployed and wondering what to do next since they don’t seem to have any type of useful skills. But Billy gets an idea to sign them both up for an internship at Google.

After a questionable interview via a Google Hangout, and some reservations from the director of the Google internship program, Mr. Chetty (Aasif Mandvi), Billy and Nick are invited to participate. The internship program is designed to split all the interns up into teams to compete in a series of challenges. The winning team wins full time jobs at Google.

Naturally, Billy and Nick stand out amongst the room full of young twentysomethings, particularly in the eyes of the clearly qualified and highly educated Graham (Max Minghella). The guys have no choice but to be paired up with the intern rejects, Stuart (Dylan O’Brien), Neha (Tiya Sircar) and Yo-Yo Santos (Tobit Raphael). Heading up their team is Lyle (Josh Brener), one of the Google intern captains.

You can probably guess what happens next. Graham’s team is clearly the team to beat. Billy and Nick’s team comes in last place at everything in the beginning, but as the old guys pass along their wisdom of the world to the younger folks, they start to pull it together.

It doesn’t get much more generic that that, almost closely related to another Vince Vaughn movie, “Old School.” For that matter, Vaughn very well could have just been playing his “Old School” roll of Bernie Campbell once again. But that’s something we’ve come to expect from Vaughn. We all know the one and only roll he seems capable of playing – boisterous and fast-talking.

Mix that with Wilson’s slow, dry and nasally cadences at the exact same time, and you’re left with two very different speaking styles that’s almost as tolerable as nails on a chalkboard. But once again, this isn’t anything new. We saw it already in “Wedding Crashers.” It wasn’t all that tolerable then, but it’s really nothing new.

Thankfully, the moments when these two are both trying to talk over one another are kept to a minimum. There are several instances when Vaughn and Wilson are on camera without the other one. Wilson’s character even has a subplot all to his own, a little romantic interest with a Google employee (Rose Byrne).

Vaughn wrote the story and the screenplay along with Jared Stern, and their material is nothing new. It constantly swings from being mildly humorous to practically unbearable and back again. The humor is situational in nature and not all that smart. There are several moments where the humor is left up the film editor and the music supervisors – meaning everyone runs in slow motion with a goofy expression on their face while some ironic song plays on top. Play it at a normal speed without the music and you just got a group of guys running around. There’s nothing funny about that.

You don’t have to look too close. “The Internship” is a two-hour product placement for Google. Every scene features something about the company and the products they offer. It serves no other purpose. They’re also showing off Google’s work environment. It there’s as much fun and games at that company as this movie demonstrates, its no wonder my Gmail fails on me so often – no one there ever works.

A theme about never giving up in the face of adversary is hammered home on several different occasions. That seems to be a common theme at many high school and college commencement addresses.

Given the current state of the job market for college graduates in recent years, it’s not a surprise that’s the point their trying to make, particularly in a film that’s centered around a large group of people competing for small number of jobs. Don’t give up, grads. There is hope for you. Go work at Google where you can take a nap in the middle of the day and play Quidditch in your free time.