FOR actor Vince Vaughn, this blatant product-placement movie is a vanity. That remark sticks out like the proverbial.
The product is internet search engine Google. Early last century, Barney Google was a daily newspaper cartoon strip character with big big eyes. In a digital way, Google search engine has those, too. We use it daily free of charge and it is good. The film in an oblique way explains how corporate Google makes money.
The screenplay, co-written by Vaughn and Jared Stern, gives Vaughn the best of the story playing its chief clown Billy who with best buddy Nick needs a safe income stream after the company where they are a successful sales team goes to the wall.
Billy and Nick, digitally illiterate, get accepted in a Google course to train for selection as the next crop of future Google employees. That’s a very competitive process.
“The Internship” resembles a gazillion of other campus movies, bursting with clichés, untrammeled by credibility, requiring little by way of acting prowess (although Rose Byrne as an Aussie company researcher, Max Minghella as a candidate with expectations and Owen Wilson as Nick fare well enough).
Its journey is toward the inevitable happy ending, to which Billy makes a significant contribution by being a loud-mouthed attention grabber whom you’d like to whack about the ears with a baseball bat. Without Vince Vaughn playing him, there’d be no film. Think about that.
At Capitol 6, Dendy, Hoyts and Limelight
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