The Google Crashers
It's not good when you're pitching a product to a client for them to turn around and tell you that your business has just closed but that is what happened to salesmen and best friends Billy (Vince Vaughn) and Nick (Owen Wilson). Whilst Nick takes a job as a mattress salesman Billy hits Google looking for work which is how he discovers a Google Internship and enrols himself and Nick into it despite having no idea about the world of Google. Miraculously Billy and Nick get selected but find themselves with the misfits when the interns are split in to groups and having to fight harder than everyone else to work as a team and deal with the vindictive Graham (Max Minghella) who bullies them.
Let me just say now that "The Internship" is quite amusing if you happen to make a living on line, listening to some of the things which are mentioned, from contextual advertising to a helpdesk all brought a smile to my face. I am sure anyone who runs a website and uses Google products will also share that smile but then whilst Google allowed the writers to use the brand and the Googleplex to film in for a few days this wasn't an accurate movie about the Google way of business.
But I would imagine there are many who would have missed out on this layer of amusement and instead got what was sadly an incredibly forced comedy. Listening to Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn calling each other buddy names, slapping each others backs, sharing a bed and so on was just not funny. Yes a few years ago Wilson and Vaughn rocked it big time with "The Wedding Crashers" but this reunion which of course featured other familiar buddies such as a cameo for Will Ferrell just didn't rock it like before. It is a case that with "The Internship" lightning doesn't strike twice.
Yet having said that "The Internship" is still entertaining in an average way and much of that is down to the likeable nature of the storyline. Ironically the underlying storyline is something which Vince Vaughn and Wilson's brother Luke had already explored when they did "Old School" because for all the dressing up "The Internship" is the old story of the geeks having trouble on campus and having to do battle with some bullies in a series of competitions along the way. And along that way there is some bonding, some guidance, some romance as well as a triumphant ending all of which have been done before but in this case done in the realms of a "Google Internship" rather than a college campus.
What this all boils down to is that "The Internship" is fun and a reasonable way to waste a couple of hours especially for those who work online and use the real Google products day in day out. But this isn't Vaughn and Wilson at their best and unfortunately far too much of it ends up coming across as forced to be really good.
