““The Internship” Is Funny, Though Instead Of Google, It Should Have Taken Place At A Hospital.  That Would Have Been Only Slightly More Preposterous, Though Better Situated For A Much Needed Testicular Implant.”

You may be wondering why this review is for “The Internship,” as opposed to “The Purge,” the film that I woke up this morning with every intention of seeing.

The long and short of it is that if you pick up tickets to an Advanced Screening of anything, it’s worth your while to arrive at least an hour early, though unlike with other screenings that I have known of (“Attack The Block”) an alternative was provided for those of us that have to do things like work and weren’t able to get the theater on time.

“The Internship” was that film, which I enjoyed a lot more that I thought I would.  Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson have this quality about them that makes them seem like people that you’d enjoy knowing better.  Particular Vaughn, who seems to have an almost Jobsian ability to make himself seem likable. 

My next question isn’t particularly relevant to my review, but I wonder what happened to Wilson’s nose.   It had to have been broken at some point (and healed badly) because his bridge is a bit awkwardly shaped.

Now on to the not-so-good stuff.  My only problem with the film is that I tend to judge comedies by those that have had the greatest impact on me, like  “Slap Shot,” “Animal House,” “Uptown Saturday Night,” and “Funny Farm,” among others.

By my reckoning, what made those films so great was that, despite being comedies, they weren’t afraid to show the darker side of things.

In fact, that made them not only funnier, but resonant.

Which is what “The Internship” lacks.

The film involves two guys, Billy and Nick (Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson) who are salesmen for a small watch company, which goes out of business.  Now keep in mind that this is all these guys know, but they get over it so quickly, it’s almost as if it never mattered in the first place.

This tendency to either gloss over painful events – or to ignore them entirely – happens again when Billy and Nick are interning at Google.  Initially – and for most of the movie, in fact – they have nothing to offer their fellow interns, yet somehow this is OK just because they take a few socially awkward young people out on the town, and almost get them laid.

Give me a break.  I have had a job that I have worked at for 13 years literally vanish from under me recently, and I can tell you, I was just a bit more concerned about little things like paying the rent, eating regularly, stuff like that.

While Billy, who early in the film not only has his home foreclosed on, but the woman he’s been living with for years leaves him, yet he seems pretty OK with that (if he goes any period of loss or doubt it’s not even implied, never mind shown), and that’s the problem.

“Slap Shot” is so funny BECAUSE you can feel how desperate Reggie Dunlap (Paul Newman) is.  In fact, that desperation drives, motivates and informs his character.  And at the end, he even rose about it, though the important thing was that we went on that journey with him.

His flaws humanized him, making him into someone that we could relate to on an even greater level.

Billy and Nick, by way of comparison, are like teflon.  They don’t feel much of anything, and virtually nothing touches them.  As a result we feel little for them because their experience is more akin to a fairy tale than something real people encounter.

Their exploits are amusing, but fade as fast as the chances of two guys who barely know what a computer is making the cut for an internship at Google.