The Internship

“OK, we need a new vehicle for Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn. Ideas?”
“They could…put on dresses and hide out in a women’s fat farm!”
“OK, good start. Seems familiar but not too…”
“Or! We could send them to a women’s prison…or a convent!”
“OK, let’s give the drag thing a rest…anyone else got anything?”
“What if they…they’re garbage men! And they get involved with a femme fatale/murder mystery thing!”
“No good. We’ve already got Eddy Murphy and Martin Lawrence doing the Men At Work reboot. Anyone else?”
“How about we make them regular guys who get caught up in a world of technology they don’t understand. We’ll have them say things like ‘the world-wide webs’ and ‘electronic mail’?”
“And ‘The Google’! Hahahahah!”
“That’s great! Wait, let’s have them work at Google! That’s a freaky place! Total fish-out-of-water story!”
“Let’s have them work at Google as interns!
“Ooh, I bet we could get Google to put up some bucks, too…”

This has been my impression of how the brainstorming for the Wilson/Vaughn vehicle The Internship might have gone, although the truth is probably closer to: someone read a story about Google and thought it would make a funny story to have an ordinary, non-technical guy try to fit in there.

From there, getting the Wedding Crashers crew back together had to be pretty much a slam dunk.

This is probably exactly what you think it is: V&W doing their schtick for about two hours, and if you like that schtick, you’ll like this movie. It could hardly be any more predictable or by-the-numbers. The jokes are frequent enough and amusing enough that the time flies pretty well, but this is basically the same movie as Monsters University, without any of the depth or originality.

I mean, we all liked it okay. We laughed, and that’s the first job of a comedy. But it doesn’t quite feel like a movie. It’s hollow. It’s an amusing two hour commercial for Google.

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