Movie Review: ‘The Internship’

Nick Hamden

When you first heard about “The Internship,” (Trailer) you thought one of three things:

“Oh great, a movie where the jokes are only at the expense of nerds and old people trying to be hip!”

“Oh great, a giant advertisement movie for Google!”

“Oh great, an Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn movie trying to recapture the magic that happened with ‘Wedding Crashers‘ in 2005!”

Well, to be fair, I think all of these ended up being true.

Billy (Vaughn) and Nick (Wilson) are a great team and have been for decades. They sell watches and they have personality. Sales have been down this year, and they find out in the middle of a potential big sale that their company has folded. Great, what are two unskilled salesmen to do with the economy like it is?

Well, get a job at Google, of course! Or at least an interview, for an internship, that could lead to a job. While not being extremely qualified candidates, they are able to smooth talk their way into the intern process, because not every applicant should be a perfect nerd 20-something with no actual life experience.

Needless to say, they are not popular amongst the other applicants. Only one team of interns will be guaranteed to receive jobs by the end of the summer and when it comes time to pick teams, they are stuck with the other nerds who weren’t picked (Tiya SicarTobit RaphaelDylan O’Brien) and the newest and most nervous group manager (Josh Brener, who you may remember last summer in this Samsung Galaxy S3 commercial before movies).

As expected, this turns into a group of ragtag individuals, trying to work together to overcome the odds and become the top team by summer’s end. Along the way, Nick has to try and woo a higher-up Google employee (Rose Byrne), Billy has to overcome his inability to succeed, and they all have to figure out ways to beat the supergroup made by Graham Hawtrey (Max Minghella), and also convince the head of the interns (Aasif Mandvi) that they aren’t complete losers.

A comedy like this of course has a lot of cameos, including Will FerrellRob Riggle, and Josh Gad.

I know the entire idea of this movie probably is a turn-off to a lot of you. It looks formulaic, almost like a 1990s comedy (another aspect of the film that I cannot defend). But it also has something else that is hard to value, that really turns it into a decent movie. It has heart.

Wilson and Vaughn have amazing chemistry together, which is a fact we already knew. But it is amplified so well in this film! The dialogue is just so great, the two are able to make the entire thing still feel real and natural.

“The Internship” is not the funniest film of the year, nowhere close, but reports say that I giggled pretty consistently throughout it. The film also accurately showed the pressures that college graduates face today, where they can be perfect their entire life and still have trouble/stress once they hit the real world.

I did hate a few of the “speeches” by the end of the film, when they were announcing the winners. I think they cheapened the results by going about them that way, and could have easily been more clever about it. I’d say “The Internship” is worth checking out, but only if you are wanting a feel-good story and if it’s a matinee.

3/5.