Way, way, WAY back in 2005, the only comedy worth seeing – to hear others tell it, anyway – was Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn’s Wedding Crashers, in which they played mischievous ladies men and best friends John and Jeremy. In many ways representing the high water mark for the way rude and crude could make a killing at the box office, the film helped pave the way for Judd Apatow, Jonah Hill and the Hangover trilogy with its tales flush with bromance and diarrhea. It was also a turning point for both leads, with Wilson especially taking advantage of the momentum in the form of a Golden Globe nomination for his role in Woody Allen’s excellent Midnight in Paris. This year sees the pair trade in their dancing shoes (not to mention their R-rating) for unemployment slips in The Internship, which also sees Vaughn reunite with director (then-producer) Shawn Levy and producer Jared Stern from last year’s The Watch.The Internship doesn’t stray far from Wedding Crashers’ formula, with Vaughn and Wilson playing Billy and Nick, best friends, comrades in arms and salesmen extraordinaire whose futures look bleak after their jobs are made obsolete and then terminated by the growing technology market. As unemployment wreaks havoc on their home lives, Billy comes upon the solution to all their problems: Google. He and Nick apply to the company’s ultracompetitive intern program, and they find themselves pitted against college kids from all around the country, with the winners being guaranteed jobs with the company. Teamed up with a ragtag group of rejects and long-shots, Billy and Nick must rally their forces and go for the gold if they want to have any shot at avoiding a future of middling retail work.Sometimes the resulting movie actually lives up to the Wedding Crashers comparisons. Both Vaughn and Wilson are hugely likeable actors, and for different reasons: Vaughn’s blue-collar gabbing and Wilson’s easy Texas charm. Considering that both the script and director center them within every single scene, it’s fortunate that in these two men we have actors able to carry such a movie. The PG-13 rating shackles what Levy can do from a humor standpoint (somewhere in here, there’s an Unrated DVD just waiting to see the light of day), and as a result we mainly get pop culture reference after pop culture reference. It’s actually not bad, though at times it seems a bit inconsistent (so Billy and Nick are aware enough to make references to The Hunger Games, but are fooled when someone sends them to find “Professor Charles Xavier”? And I’m sorry, but Flashdance is just obscure enough a reference thirty years later that a self-absorbed college kid probably won’t know enough to realize what it is). As it stands, The Internship relies a little too much on its lead actors and their easy camaraderie to get by, and it often shows.Which is a shame, because when the script gives somebody else a chance it just soars. Vaughn and Wilson are good, but the kids they’re paired up with manage to steal scene after scene, often eliciting some of the movie’s best laughs in the process. Yes, they’re stock characters, with the cynical tech-head (Dylan O’Brien), insecure first-time leader (Josh Brenner), nerdy kink enthusiast (Tiya Sircar), and introverted self-disciplining Asian (Tobit Raphael). But what makes all the difference is how enthusiastically these young talents approach the material, each shining in their own unique way, even if at best they possess slightly more than one-note roles. And while the support cast is stocked with similarly-limited characters such as the bully, the love interest, the cantankerous supervisor, the dancer who turns to stripping to make ends meet (no, really), the unscrupulous businessman, and the quiet one, they’re superbly cast and more than adequately performed by Max Minghella, Rose Byrne, Aasif Mandvi, Jessica Szohr, John Goodman and Josh Gad, respectively. If nothing else, Levy did a good job assembling all these actors in the same lot, and most prove his faith correct by putting forth their absolute best, even if it’s only in randomly-selected doses.But while the movie can be fun at times and doesn’t get boring after the overly-long first act, there is one major problem that ought to keep it far from must-see lists: The Internship plays out as one long commercial for Google. Everywhere you look, people having a good time and enjoying all the perks of being a member of the Google team. I could stomach this if the film had the guts to make fun of the company even a little (seriously, not even a Google+ crack?), but Levy was apparently unwilling to risk pissing off a company worth billions of dollars by having just a little fun with the material. Yes, Google is arguably the best search engine out there. Yes, it seems like half the free world has a Gmail account. Yes, Hello, Mr. Anderson is posted using their Blogger software. But that doesn’t mean I have to like a two-hour infomercial of just how cool they are. Considering that theme of this tale is discovery and innovation, using Google as an example makes sense. But then again, so would any number of similar corporations. Or a fake one made to look like Google, if you’re feeling adventurous. Either way, a great opportunity was lost, as it’s because the filmmakers actually wrote themselves into a platinum-plated corner.Evils of commercialization aside, there are successes to be found in the newest Vaughn/Wilson collaboration, though it’s fairly obvious that the filmmakers’ hands were tied within the production. When put in the same context as Wedding Crashers, The Internship’s kinda-humorous results eventually feel like a letdown. There’s some genuine entertainment to be had if you go into the theater with an open mind, but not all that much; the script is padded with clever (and often just the opposite) dialogue and references to pop culture but never really takes the time to give us a sense of identity. Unlike those two schmucks we fell in love with back in 2005, there’s no mistaking the Vince Vaughn or Owen Wilson of that era for the pair we now have today. But their latest movie is a harmless, for-the-masses comedy whose main failure is feeling out of place in a world where R-rated comedy has become the rule, not the exception. John and Jeremy probably wouldn’t bother sitting through this movie, and if they did they’d be most definitely be disappointed.John C. Anderson is a freelance writer and movie enthusiast living in Boston. His other film reviews can be found at Hello, Mr. Anderson.
