Want to play a game? Start by typing this into a Google search:
“A soulless vacuum of product placement, dead-on-arrival jokes and a sinister
misunderstanding of what technology is or will ever be, all told by two comedy
relics doing their tired, shameful shtick hunched over computers far more
advanced than themselves.” Now hit enter.
Voila, you should be back to this review. It’s like an infinite loop, and it’s the most meaningless stunt you’ll pull today unless by chance
you somehow wander, in a lonely and destitute state of boredom, into The Internship, a new movie about
Google’s long, gentle reach in the computer world.
I knew Google was brilliant before this movie. Most people do.
That’s why Google is now a verb: “Google this,” “Google that,” or “Google me a
better movie.” So it all comes off irritating, and a tad disingenuous, to see
Google featured so prominently in a movie that is more in love with Google than
any of its characters, especially its leads, Nick and Billy, two guys who live
in 2013 but are somehow still figuring out the most basic concepts of the
Internet. Billy, for instance, keeps saying “on the line” for things he views,
you know, online. The Video Professor (Google him) would have a field day with
this technophobe.
Nick (Owen Wilson) and Billy (Vince Vaughn) are deadbeat salesmen
from an old order of salesmen, the shoe-leather salesmen from Glengarry Glen Ross: working their
angles, pitching their patter, twisting personal stories back to sales hooks …
the “coffee is for closers” salesmen. Anyway, they’re laid off and with only
the most basic understanding of computers — they have to go to the public
library to use one — they sign up for a tech internship at Google. The program
doesn’t pay, but if they make the cut after the summer, they get full-time paid
positions.
Of course, since the people at Google are so brilliant, they
witness these two bozos shamefully pecking at keyboards and mixing up C++ with
letter grades on report cards and rightfully have Google security remove them
from the tech giant’s campus. And that’s it; the movie only lasts seven
minutes. Ha, only in my dreams. No, Google doesn’t notice these two imbeciles,
even after they fail the pre-quiz, the one that asks them if it’s OK to steal
pudding cups from the lunch areas.
Billy and Nick are put onto a team of rejects, because that’s how
Google apparently hires people: mash everyone into groups and then hire the
teams that work best based on arbitrary tasks. Never mind that bad people end
up on good teams and good people end up on bad teams, but whatever. Their team
is made up of the infantile fantasies of terrible screenwriters. Two of them
are Star Wars nerds, one who dresses
up in kinky Princess Leia cosplay and another who rambles in some sort of
ghetto-dweeb dialogue. There’s an Asian kid, who plucks hairs from his eyebrows
to appease his raging tiger mother who isn’t even present in the movie. Another
kid doesn’t notice the Golden
Gate Bridge
The teams are thrown into a techy thunderdome of coding, debugging,
customer service and, inexplicably, Quidditch, the fake
hockey-meets-soccer-meets-geekfest sport in the Harry Potter universe. Yes, they play Quidditch. If you see the
movie, then this is your cue to use the bathroom; you won’t miss anything. I
don’t know, maybe they play Quidditch at Google. The movie was filmed at its Mountain View , Calif.
Going back to the Google facility, it’s probably framed
accurately, if Google exists in a Dr. Seuss book: rainbow-painted bikes,
candy-colored beanbag chairs, oversized umbrellas, snazzy sleep pods, indoor
slides and enough smiling, high-fiving extras to make you question your own
happiness at a job that’s not Google. Apparently, Google didn’t pay a thing to
get The Internship to feature the
company as this theme-parky computer utopia. Again, maybe Google really is this
way, but then why just focus on the perks? We see all these people drinking
free coffees, riding free bikes and napping on Google’s dime, but I never
really got an idea what Google does. The movie only cares about the carnival
atmosphere. Ultimately, The Internship
should have used a fictional company, if only so it could make some jokes about
companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft. As it is here, though, the film
seems more concerned with framing Google in a positive light than making us
laugh, which it does very few times.
Even more frustrating, this movie has a woman problem. In the
real world, tech companies are tripping over themselves to include more women, and to clean up the sexist, misogynist and discriminatory environments that the fanboys have created. It’s a sexist and mean
attitude, and it shouldn’t be here in this movie, yet here it is with an
extended sequence in a strip club, where women are given more speaking parts
than any other portions of the film. Football movies, gangster movies, Las Vegas movies … a strip
club scene isn’t that far fetched in other genres. But a movie about a company
and its search engine? Surely it qualifies to be stripper-free. But no.
Much of this would be forgiven if only it were funny. Comedy can
be a rewarding phenomenon and it can gloss over other failures, yet The Internship inspires more cringes
than guffaws. Will Ferrell molesting a customer at a mattress store. Cringe.
Vaughn singing Alanis Morisette songs in a convertible. Cringe. Wilson and
Vaughn explaining a pointless blender metaphor. Cringe. Vaughn referencing Flashdance. Cringe. The kid with mother
issues talking about his breakfast, “milk of the bosom.” Cringe, cringe,
cringe. Cringe times a googol.
What it all comes down to is that Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn
are comedy dinosaurs who are unfunny at best, despicably outdated and pathetic at worst. They haven’t been funny in a very long
time; since 2005 according to that Onion piece. Vaughn runs his mouth a lot, his trademark, and 80 percent of what spews
out is nonsense, just noise to fill the silent void in this dopey comedy. Wilson , whose coifed hair
looks like an Elton John wig, just seems tired and defeated. They’re both doing
their Wedding Crashers parts and it’s
painfully out of place here at Google of all places. These guys were once
comedy elites, now reduced down to the quality of Rob Schneider, Katherine Heigl,
Mike Myers and Adam Sandler.
And then Google … it has enough geniuses there to know better to
get involved with a film that doesn't have the most fundamental
understanding of comedy, the Internet or technology. I mean come on, the movie
could have Googled better jokes. So it’s only Google’s fault for jumping into
bed with The Internship.
All I know is I’m switching to Bing.
