Normally in the opening paragraph of a review, it’s my job as a writer to tease you and get you hooked so that you click on the story and read more. I won’t tease you with this one: it’s possibly the worst movie of the year, and it’s unbecoming of one of the planet’s
best companies. I dare you to read on.
This review contains spoilers, but honestly, who cares.
The Internship stars Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson as two salesmen flogging watches whose company gets shut down. “Everything’s digital these days,” says their retiring boss, John Goodman, of the watch industry. So begins their quest to find a new job.
Vaughn’s character (seriously, names don’t matter in this movie) stumbles onto Google to search for new jobs when he actually decides that the search engine could be the answer to all of their problems. Cue a dramatic realisation, and the two of them head to Mountain View to start a job at Google. What they find, however, is an internship program where they will compete for jobs in teams against others.
Cue a pre-packaged fish-out-of-water story that a ten-year old could write with a few broken crayons, a poorly executed love story between Owen Wilson and a senior Googler in the form of Rose Byrne with toilet humour, racial stereotypes and a cookie-cutter cast of jocks, nerds and geeks.
What’s so disappointing about this movie is that it’s set against the backdrops of one of the world’s smartest, most inspiring companies: Google. A company whose founder got up at its most recent developer conference and showed us why we still believe that six little letters in a nonsense word can still help change the world.
Watching Vaughn and Wilson navigate their internships is like watching your parents discovering Google+: difficult and unadvisable.
One of the worlds smartest companies has been reduced to lowest common denominator humour. It’s has no moral substance, no intellectual credibility and barely any anchor in reality, so why did Google do it? Why choose to be affiliated with this movie?
One simple reason: advertising.
If you take a shot every time you see a Nexus device or a Chromebook, you’ll be dead of alcohol poisoning before the first reel is through. The whole movie culminates in a scene where the intern team shows a local business how they can expand using Google’s services, including Trends, Analytics, Google+, Nexus devices and good-old fashioned enthusiasm. It’s an unintelligent Google ad starring a giant and a once-broken nose.
The Internship only has one redeeming feature: Mountain View. If you’ve ever wondered what Google’s main campus really looks like, or been curious as to the perks that Googlers enjoy, wait for The Internship to come out on DVD and Blu-ray, fast-forward to when they arrive at Google and enjoy that five minutes. Then take the disc out of your player and set it the f*ck on fire. It’s the least the movie deserves.