The Internship (2013)
It was a Wednesday when I saw The Internship. No wait! I think it was a Thursday. I remember it was close to the end of the week. For movies on either end of the scale – really good or really bad – my memory is always crystal clear about the time and the place. The Internship ebbs so firmly in the middle that I felt nothing. I strain now to remember anything about it. The only thing that I am sure about is that for one hundred and fifty nine minutes, I sat in front of this movie staring into its colorful maw with a feeling that could only be described as baleful indifference.
The Internship had no effect on me. None. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Bupkis. It’s a comedy. There are people on the screen. They say things in a humorous way in the midst of a humorous situation. It has the pieces that resemble a comedy and yet I could not care less about anything happening on the screen. Not that I carried a cup of apathy into the screening with me, heaven’s no. It’s just that I was ready to be entertained and the movie was giving me nothing. It’s not the worst comedy I’ve ever seen. There were moments when I kind of smiled and I admit that some scenes contained a measure of comic energy.
The movie stars Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson who have been funny together before in movies like Wedding Crashers and Starsky and Hutch. They have a nice rapport with each other and a natural ease on the screen. They bring some of that to The Internship. Vaughn and Wilson play Billy and Nick respectively, two old friends who have made a living selling designer watches for 20 years. Then one day, their boss tells them that they’re out of a job because people don’t buy watches anymore – they get everything they need by looking at their cell phones. Out of work, they become desperate to get back in the job pool. Nick goes to work in a mattress store and Billy gets the idea to join the internship program at Google despite the fact that they know virtually nothing about computers. He encourages his buddy to quit the mattress store and go with him.
At Google, they meet the stuffy, hate-spewing leader of the program who reminds the new recruits – who are called Noogles and forced to wear propeller beanies – that they are all destined to fail. Billy and Nick see through his B.S. and set out to turn the Google think tank into a fully functioning frat house.
That’s it. That’s the movie. The rest is a series of gags and set pieces in which Billy and Nick upset the establishment, have parties, take the other interns to a strip club, and get under the skin of the project leader who, naturally, wants to sabotage their chances.
Again, I watched all of this with bored indifference. None of it stuck. I strain now to remember anything about it. If you see it today, you’ll be bored too. Tomorrow you won’t remember the title. Two days from now you won’t remember the plot. A year from now you won’t remember having seen it at all. I’m bored just writing about it.