Two salesmen whose careers have been torpedoed by the digital age find their way into a coveted internship at Google, where they must compete with a group of young, tech-savvy geniuses for a shot at employment.
Vaughn and Wilson have a nice bantering chemistry but their material is terribly thin.
While Wilson and Vaughn saunter through proceedings with all the oblivious charm they’ve got, everything else backfires: there’s nothing like being told what great, bright, human gifts a company thinks it’s bequeathing to the world to make you contemplate googling - for a search engine other than Google.
There’s a certain sweetness in the team bonding that Billy and Nick inspire but none of the cool, sexy laughs you’d expect from this pair. They are, ironically, looking rather past their sell by date.
The barbed humour, at its best reminiscent of Barry Levinson's Tin Men, gives way to gloopy sentimentality.
This is a dreary experience, which incidentally includes a fair bit of stereotyping about how adorably geeky and yet unthreatening south Asians are.
Egregious product placement for Google notwithstanding, The Internship proves a much funnier proposition than its generation gap comedy premise might suggest.
Alongside the film’s increasingly irritating ‘Googliness’, The Internship is as silver-tongued and soulless as the rhetoric it appears to peddle.
Getting explicit sponsorship from Google is one thing; acting as an extended ad for Silicon Valley's finest strip joint does seem a bit seedy.
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