Movie Review: The Internship

The Internship (2013)

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.  Short synopsis of The Internship taken from IMDb.com 

Watched this with my wife after renting it from Redbox.  She had seen the trailer for it and said it looked like a "Redbox watch," and now that I've seen it, I'm glad we waited.  The Internship would have been a  disappointing theater date night.

The story is pretty cliché, even with a modern twist on it.  And having just made my notes for Elysium, I can say this film is also one that falls into the "put actor(s) into movie so they can play who they normally portray, and not anyone else who may or may not be interesting to us" roles.  Hey, Hollywood!  I have an unusual and sometimes offbeat personality (my wife is shaking her head at this sentence and would love to disagree here).  How about paying me lots of money to deliver poorly written dialogue on screen?  I'll even take the hardship of having to be in scenes with attractive, half-naked women, as this film does midway through when our group of unlikely heroes goes to a local strip club and we have some pointless "alcohol and strippers makes for group bonding"-scene.  My wife turned to me at this point and said "so alcohol makes things all better, huh?"  I'd like to have argued the point, but there is just no convincing that woman that booze and barely clad ladies make for a really kick-ass night.  She's one of those "old-fashioned girls," I guess.

I can only imagine an entire wall of such gauges, showing the relative morality of all sorts of things in our world.  Congress's gauge has been broken for some time, I'd imagine.  After all, a gauge can only take so much pressure for so long before it pops a mainspring or something. / Soucre: brandrants.com

Anyway, for me, The Internship was amusing, though as I said, it was certainly not new ground. And the thinly-veiled commercial running throughout for Google was really obnoxious.  It went something like: "Hey world!  Google isn't evil.  We are a pure and good company that just wants to make life easier.  For all of you who use our products, that is.  And if you few renegades and heretics out there who don't use our products, we'll find you and make your virtual life a living hell.  We have all power, don't you know?  Mwuahahaha!!!"  Ok, Google-related rant ended. Hey, I'm a hypocrite, and I admit it.  I found Google a month or so after getting home from Arizona some twelve or thirteen years ago, and have used it, with some odd exceptions, as my homepage ever since.  I read about it in the newspaper, if that tells you how long ago it was.  Do they even have those anymore (Note the sarcastic grin when I said that, gentle reader).

The last quarter of the film was the best part, though also the smalziest.  Everything works out in the end for our intrepid group of interns, and we all learn life lessons, blah blah blah.  The film wasn't particularly repugnant.  It just was not really good either.  Worth the Redbox rental for the time spent together as a couple, and it had some nice moments (the Quiditch match was fun and - with one forgettable moment of crudity dealing with the Snitch - pleasant to watch).  But I'd not view The Internship twice in one lifetime.  Not willingly, anyway.

Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, the stars of The Internship.  For what they had to handle, I suppose these two did a pretty good job of filling their roles well. / Source: theweek.com

P.S. the language in the movie was pretty strong too.  I am amazed at what gets a PG-13 these days.  Yes, I feel old saying that, but it isn't just a matter of old-fashioned values, I think.  I'm no pious type, but it does seem to me that the Bible implies (and probably out-right says, but I'm too lazy to go quote chapter and verse today, sorry) that what you say out of your mouth becomes part of who you are and if you say bad things... well...  yeah.  OK, hypocritical moment over. Yes, the participants are just actors, and it is just a dumb movie, but should such language be so easily passed off as the current trend?  So much crudity should not be so casual.  That's all I'm saying.

The parting comment:

One day we may all very well ask each other, "Where did you first learn about the all-mighty overlord -never speak its name without reverence- .... (whispered) 'Google'?"  I kid, of course.  Oh, and I can tell you why Google doesn't offer an opt-out service, so that you don't have to have them track your stuff, but pay for the privilege.  Ready for this?  Because they don't have to.  They make their money, so why muddy it up with unnecessary options?  The man in the vid makes a good point though.  It is those who use these tools that we all have so much access to these days, and then make decisions over your day-to-day life that you can't "opt-out" of (such as jail time), that really scares the tickle monster out of me.