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The Internship

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The Internship
Theatrical release poster
Directed byShawn Levy
Screenplay byVince Vaughn
Jared Stern
Story byVince Vaughn
Produced byVince Vaughn
Shawn Levy
StarringVince Vaughn
Owen Wilson
CinematographyJonathan Brown
Edited byDean Zimmerman
Production
companies
Distributed by20th Century Fox
Release date
  • June 7, 2013 (2013-06-07)
Running time
119 minutes[1]
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$58 million[2]
Box office$93,492,822[3]

The Internship is a 2013 American comedy film directed by Shawn Levy, written by Vince Vaughn and Jared Stern, and produced by Vaughn and Levy. The film stars Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson in their third film together after starring in the 2004 film Starsky & Hutch and the 2005 film Wedding Crashers. This is also the second collaboration of Levy, Vaughn, and Stern after the 2012 film The Watch. The main location of the film is the Googleplex, the real-life headquarters of Google in Mountain View, California.

Plot

Billy McMahon and Nick Campbell seek employment after being laid off from their positions as watch salesmen when their employer goes out of business. Billy then applies for an internship at Google for the two of them, and they are accepted due to their unorthodox interview answers, despite a lack of relevant experience; they are the only interns not of traditional collegiate age. They will spend the summer competing in teams against other interns, also known as "Nooglers", in a variety of tasks, and only the members of the winning team will be guaranteed jobs with Google. Billy and Nick are teamed with other interns seen as rejects: Stuart, who is usually engrossed in his smart phone; Yo-Yo, a Filipino-American boy who was homeschooled by a stereotypical overbearing Asian mother; and Neha, an Indian-American girl who is an enthusiast of nerd-related kink. The team is led by Lyle, who constantly tries to act hip in order to hide his insecurities. Another intern, Graham, aggressively bullies Billy and Nick's team. Mr. Chetty, the head of the internship program, also expresses his doubts about the older men's abilities. Stuart, Yo-Yo, and Neha see Billy and Nick as useless during a task focused on debugging, and send them on a wild goose chase to find the fictional character, Professor X. But later, during a game of Muggle Quidditch against Graham's team, Billy rallies his team to a comeback that unifies them as a team despite ultimately losing.

When the teams are tasked with developing an app, Billy and Nick convince the team to indulge in a wild night out. At a strip club in San Francisco's Chinatown District, Neha admits to Billy that, despite her rich fantasy life, she has no real-world experience and is nervous; with his support, she decides to stay. Nick gets Yo-Yo to break out of his shell by drinking and receiving lap dances. And, encouraged by Billy, Lyle approaches one of the dancers, Marielena, who is also a dance instructor at Google on whom he had developed a crush. She is charmed by him, but another customer challenges Lyle for her attention and a fight breaks out; the team is ejected from the club. Before sunrise that same night, overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, Stuart learns to appreciate his surroundings, and Lyle's drunken antics inspire the team to create an app that guards against reckless phone usage while drunk; they win the task by earning the most downloads.

Meanwhile, Nick has been flirting with an executive, Dana, with little success. When he begins attending technical presentations to impress her, he develops an interest in the material. While the teams prepare to staff the technical support hotline, only Billy feels at a loss. A Google employee, "Headphones", who always wears headphones and never socializes, approaches Billy and tells him that the way he interacts with people is special. He tutors Billy on the technical information. Dana agrees to go on a date with Nick, and she invites him in at the end of the evening. During the task, Billy is comfortable with the material, but his team receives no score because he failed to properly log his calls for review. Dejected, Billy leaves Google to pursue a new sales opportunity with his former boss. The final task is announced as a sales challenge; teams must sign the largest possible company to begin advertising with Google. The team is stunned when Nick tells them that Billy has left, and they declare that they do not want to do the task without him. Nick convinces Billy to return, and Billy leads the team to show a local pizzeria owner how Google can help him interact with potential customers and thereby expand his business, while remaining true to his professional values.

Back at Google headquarters, Chetty is about to award the opposing team, given Lyle's team's non-attendance. When suddenly the screen behind him lights up - Lyle's team dancing with giant Afros to Irene Cara's "Flashdance... What a Feeling", while Billy throws pizza at everyone. Chetty recognizes that although the pizzeria is not a large business, its potential is limitless because it has embraced technology. Graham protests and is dressed down by Headphones, who turns out to be the head of Google Search. Nick, Billy, Lyle, Stuart, Yo-Yo, and Neha are declared the winners and will receive jobs at Google, which the latter three will start after their senior years in college. A furious Graham berates his team for failing to contribute, but Zach, the obese member of the team, has had enough of his bullying and stands up to him by giving Graham a blow to the chest. As the students depart, Nick and Dana are still seeing each other, as are Lyle and Marielena. Stuart and Neha have formed a romantic connection, as well. And Yo-Yo asserts himself to his mother (supported wholeheartedly by his father).

Cast

Interns
Google staff
Others

Reception

The Internship received mixed to negative reviews from critics. The ratings site Rotten Tomatoes gives it a score of 34% based on 158 reviews. The site's consensus states: "The Internship weighs down Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson's comic charisma with a formulaic script and padded running time that leans far too heavily on its stars' easygoing interplay".[5] The film also has a Metacritic score of 42 out of 100, based on 36 reviews.[6]

A majority of the reviewers have derided it for being a feature-length Google commercial. In his review, Ty Burr of The Boston Globe commented: "Here’s why Google is so successful: It's figured out a way for Twentieth Century Fox to make a two-hour Google commercial disguised as a summer comedy".[7] Stephen Rea of The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote on his review, "The Internship itself would be kind of charming, too, if this Google-recruitment film, this 119-minute commercial for Googliness, weren't so downright creepy".[8] The Guardian's David Cox described the movie as a "two-hour corporate video,"[9] while British film critic Mark Kermode called the film "the longest advert I've seen in the cinema". He dismissed it as "one of the most witless, humourless, vomit-inducingly horribly self-satisfied, smug, unfunny comedies I have ever seen".[10]

One critique was that combining Vaughn and Wilson with Google was simply badly timed, and that The Internship would have had a much better reception if it had come out on the heels of Vaughn and Wilson's success in 2005's Wedding Crashers. This fact of timing was satirized by a video news story run by The Onion, a satirical newspaper, titled "The Internship Poised to be Biggest Comedy of 2005".[11]

Many former Google interns and Google employees noted the accuracy of the company environment depicted in the movie, but also pointed out that the internship process is nothing like that shown in the movie.[12]

Home media

The Internship was released in "Unrated" form on DVD and Blu-ray Combo Pack on October 22, 2013.[13] This edition runs 125 minutes and contains profanity and nudity not found in the theatrical release.

References

  1. ^ "THE INTERNSHIP (12A)". British Board of Film Classification. May 10, 2013. Retrieved May 10, 2013.
  2. ^ Kaufman, Amy (June 6, 2013). "Box office: Low-budget 'The Purge' expected to beat 'The Internship'". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved June 7, 2013.
  3. ^ "The Internship". Box Office Mojo. Internet Movie Database. Retrieved September 13, 2013.
  4. ^ "JoAnna Garcia Swisher in Shawn Levy's Internship". June 27, 2012.
  5. ^ "The Internship". Rotten Tomatoes by Flixster. Archived from the original on August 5, 2013. Retrieved July 18, 2013.
  6. ^ "The Internship". Metacritic/CBS Interactive. Retrieved August 19, 2013.
  7. ^ Burr, Ty (June 5, 2013). "Vaughn and Wilson Are Silicon Valley Crashers". The Boston Globe. Retrieved August 19, 2013. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  8. ^ Rea, Stephen (June 7, 2013). "Buddy Film Wrapped in a Google Ad". The Philadelphia Inquirer. Retrieved August 19, 2013. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  9. ^ Cox, David (July 1, 2013). "The Internship: how cinema sold its soul – but didn't get paid". The Guardian (UK). Archived from the original on August 2, 2013. Retrieved August 2, 2013.
  10. ^ "Mark Kermode reviews The Internship" on YouTube, The Guardian (UK), 1 July 2013.
  11. ^ "'The Internship' Poised To Be Biggest Comedy Of 2005", The Onion, 6 June 2013.
  12. ^ Anthony, Brian (June 9, 2013). "Real Google Interns: 'The Internship' Movie Kind of Nails It". Mashable.com. Retrieved February 7, 2014.
  13. ^ Davis, Clayton (August 21, 2013). ""The Internship" Comes Home on the Hilarious Unrated Edition Blu-ray October 22!". Awards Circuit. Retrieved October 24, 2013. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
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