The film, directed by Shawn Levy (of “Date Night” and “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian”) and written by Vaughn and Jared Stern (of “The Watch” and “Mr. Popper’s Penguins”), could have been set anywhere, but places the protagonists in Google’s headquarters in San Francisco. How much will Google benefit from this film, which presents the tech company as the best place to work ever, with the best perks and the best-looking employees and the best values and the best everything? Maybe it won’t significantly swell Google’s applicant pool, but it can’t hurt—the place is depicted as a paradise, complete with free Starbuck’s and nap pods. Where can I sign up?
“The Internship” begins by cluing us in to Billy (Vaughn, of “The Watch” and “The Dilemma”) and Nick’s (Wilson, of “The Big Year,” “Cars 2,” “Midnight in Paris,” “Hall Pass,” “Little Fockers,” “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” and “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian”) plight: the company they’re salesmen for has just gone under, leaving them unemployed and with little to no marketable skills. Abandoned by girlfriends, kicked out of their homes, and wary of working minimum-wage, dead-end jobs, they decide to apply for internships at Google, because a small percentage of interns are guaranteed full-time jobs with the company afterward. And so Billy enrolls the pair in an online university so they can fit the enrolled-student portion of the internship application, books time at a public library so they can do a video chat interview, and encourages Nick to lie his way through the whole thing. What does it matter that they know nothing about coding or physics or the Internet or, you know, computers in general? They’ll figure it out when they get there.
After arriving in San Francisco, a few things happen very quickly: The pair make an enemy, the entitled, snobby Graham (Max Minghella, of “The Darkest Hour” and “The Social Network”); start off on the wrong foot with their boss, Chetty (Aasif Mandvi, of “Premium Rush,” “Ruby Sparks,” “The Dictator,” “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” and “The Last Airbender”); and find a love interest for Nick, Google executive Dana (Rose Byrne, of “X-Men: First Class,” “Bridesmaids,” and “Get Him to the Greek”).
Most importantly, though, they learn that the team of interns who wins a series of competitions throughout their internship will end up with jobs at the end of the program. And so Nick and Owen are thrown together with other misfits: young Google employee Lyle (Josh Brener), who advocated for their hiring; Stuart (Dylan O’Brien), a kind of skater kid always stuck to his smartphone; Neha (Tiya Sarcar, of “Friends with Benefits” and “17 Again”), a sex-obsessed control freak; and Yo-Yo (Tobit Raphael), a home-skilled son of controlling Asian parents. They’re all weird, but they have to win—unless they want Graham and his condescending Britishness to be successful, or Chetty, so doubtful of their skills, to be right.
“The Internship,” then, is very clearly a continuation of the kind of frat-boy humor that has propelled so much of Vaughn’s and Wilson’s careers, from “Wedding Crashers” to “Dodgeball” to “The Dilemma.” And yet, of course, the two of them are so charming together that it’s easy to feel like it’s six years ago and forget that this kind of humor is practically beaten to death by now. But as much as Vaughn and Wilson talk over each other and tumble into ridiculous situations and act self-effacing but wonderfully boy-like, it’s not new or different. It’s two actors playing two roles they always play; it’s like getting the same flavor of ice cream after you haven’t had it in years. It’s not bad, but maybe the goodness you’re assigning to it is a memory, not a reality.
The greater mistakes of the film, though, are its other obligatory elements: an extended scene in a strip club as an opportunity to show scantily clad women dancing around, or a very poorly developed romantic subplot with Wilson and Byrne, which is supposed to be an example of Nick dealing with his feelings of desperation and depression, but the film never gets dark enough emotionally. There isn’t enough bad stuff here to outweigh the good, like a very funny game of real-life Qudditch or nicely handled bonding sessions between Billy and Nick and the younger members of the group, but it is certainly uneven.
And ultimately, although the film presents this message that communicating with people face-to-face is a “lost art” and that an individual’s “intangible stuff” is particularly important, those are priorities ascribed only to Google, not necessarily to life as a whole. So “The Internship” has a weird correlation between the company seeking out these qualities in people instead of people just having them because they’re the right thing to do; as much as the film wants to be an underdog story, it sometimes seems like the message is, “Be creative and passionate because it will get you a job,” instead of, “Be creative and passionate because it will make you a better, well-rounded person.” It’s a slight difference, but it’s present, and when coupled with pro-Google lines like “It’s all waiting at the click of a button,” the film seems like it’s trying to have its cake and eat it, too. And yet who better to sell that message than Vaughn and Wilson? They peddle “The Internship,” and its conflicting messages, well enough. Expect to see this movie on basic cable sometime in the next two to three years, whenever Google fully takes over the world, and then forever.
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