Comedies are dangerous things. What is funny? That's the problem with having a sense of humor, it's a sense. It can't be pinned down or quantified. What may be funny for one situation is death for another. While the scene may be funny, the timing may ruin it. In today's comedies, they run the gamut, but I get the feeling we have actually regressed to a more coarse time where the audience is stupider. Subtlety is a dying art. It seems comedies today are flailing their arms in the air screaming, "Look at us! We're being funny!" Almost any Will Farrell movie is like this. Luckily, The Internship doesn't really subscribe to this type of humor, but yet still falls a little flat.
The movie stars that very good comedy duo Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson from Wedding Crashers. The movie is fairly straightforward. Two watch salesmen (Vaughn and Wison) find themselves out of a job when the company they work for goes bankrupt. They quickly realize they have no usable skills in the high-tech world of the Internet, where personal touches no longer matter. They decide to try for an internship at Google. The internship is essentially one big competition over the summer for just a few jobs. They quickly find themselves too old and untech savvy, but give it the old college try. They are paired with a group of cast off misfits that no one will work with. But in the tradition of all underdog movies from The Bad News Bears to Hoosiers, they find a perfect combination between the old and the new to SPOILER ALERT win the competition.
While the film is not laugh out loud funny, it really is hard to resist. This is due totally to the incredible chemistry that Vaughn and Wilson have together. They have obviously played in a lot of other movies, but when they get together, they have an unmistakeable charm that is impossible to resist. There are some movies that work solely because of who's in them and the way they work together (The Hangover, 48 Hours, A Mighty Wind, Young Frankenstein, Lethal Weapon, Coming To America, Silver Streak). The movie just would not work with anyone else because the stars aligned just right to bring that magic together. And while The Internship is by no means a comedic classic, it has just enough humor and heart to keep you invested and the story going. This was a movie made by the sheer will of the leads, and it works because of them. It is not rip roaringly funny or filled with enough pathos, but works just enough to make this a cut above average, and a perfect example of why some people are movie stars.
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