The Internship  (2013)    3/100

Rating : 3/100                                                                         119 Min        12A

Wanting to both scream and vomit at the same time, I simply sat in outraged stupefaction, as Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson regurgitated their tried and tested formula onscreen in this, their latest offering of comedy which is about as funny as weaponised Ebola. It follows the pair’s wildcard entry into the internship program at Google, after their sales company went under, wherein everyone is divided into groups to compete in a number of tasks, with only the overall best performing team being selected to work at the company – presumably to then find the best way to avoid paying tax and snoop on unsuspecting members of the public. Despite the pair knowing nothing about computers, will their maturity and enthusiasm somehow win out against the odds, and will Owen Wilson somehow seduce the super hot Rose Byrne in the process? No prizes for correctly guessing the answer.

The problem is, the formula they’re using does work. It’s easy for the audience to eventually get behind the underdogs, it’s easy to get carried along by a happy ending, and we’re led by music telling us we’re happy and having a good time all the way. It is the encapsulation of the much touted ‘feel good factor’, and even I left a little under its influence, but that does not stop it from being an extremely thin veneer on what is ultimately, and definitively, trash, and it most certainly does not compensate for the inherent lack of laughs. Part of the plot is that Vince Vaughn’s character is some kind of super salesman, but he’s about as smooth as an electrocuted porcupine – I don’t think I’d buy water off him if I was dying of thirst in the desert. The pair of them need to ditch this potboiler routine of theirs quickly before their audience is permanently turned away, but I can easily see Vaughn still attempting to do it from his wheelchair thirty years from now.

Leave a Reply

Your e-mail address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.