If you saw Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson in Wedding Crashers, Starsky & Hutch, or any of their other movies, you probably have a certain expectation of quality and hilarity from this iconic duo. Regrettably, The Internship, the pair’s newest on-screen romp, is not quite the riot you might expect. A decidedly cleaner kind of comedy than one might usually see from Wilson and Vaughn, The Internship is a cookie-cutter film aiming for warm-and-fuzzy but ending up a little irritating.
With a somewhat tired plot outline, The Internship is nothing close to unpredictable. Best friends Billy McMahon (Vaughn) and Nick Campbell (Wilson) abruptly lose their jobs as watch salesmen and, unsure of what to do and in search of new, more relevant jobs, apply for an internship at Google in what can only be described as a debacle of an interview. The pair miraculously land spots in a pool of young Ivy League graduates in which they are hideously out of place and are launched into a kind of nerdy Hunger Games of challenges in which teams compete in somewhat irrelevant challenges against one another for the ultimate prize of jobs at Google.
Naturally McMahon and Campbell end up on the team of leftover misfits and somehow immediately become bitter rivals with the team on the very top of the pyramid (all other teams more or less cease to exist at this point). They are repeatedly picked on by the overseer of the contest and fail at more than a few challenges, including an initial programming task, a Quidditch match which has no significance except to emphasize the exaggerated “nerd culture” that plagues the movie, and a customer service challenge in which McMahon drops the ball for the whole team.
Despite these disparaging failures, the near collapse of the team, and repeated assertions that team underdog is so irrevocably far behind that it is impossible for them to win, what do you know: they do. I won’t divulge the full extent of the miraculous plot twists that make this happen, but I will assure to you that they are endlessly cheesy and certainly impossible. All in all, the plot is nothing short of laughable.
The movie, however, is not entirely devoid of redeeming qualities. Wilson and Vaughn’s rambling banter, though by no means sidesplitting, is charming and pleasantly entertaining. These two simply work well together, and putting them side-by-side is a failsafe act even in a plot as abysmally bad as this one.
Additionally, the movie’s premise and morals are heartwarming if you can look past the terrible execution, but unfortunately the underdog-rising-to-the-top-through-teamwork story is so overdone that the well-meaning message falls on deaf (or at least indifferent) ears.
If you’re looking for a feel-good, mildly funny film you can put on for family movie night without the awkwardness of crude humor, this is the movie for you. However, if you plan to actually watch the movie, you’ll very likely find it to be bland, overdone, and humorous only in its disastrous failures at having any sort of believable plotline. All considered, this movie earns two stars out of five from me: one each for Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn – it was a good effort on their parts – and zero for anything else.