The Internship (2013) Review

The Internship is a 2013 comedy film directed by Shawn Levy, written by Vince Vaughn and Jared Stern and produced by Vaughn and Shawn Levy. This is the second collaboration of Levy, Vaughn, and Stern after the 2012 film The Watch. This is also the first film to use the 21st Century Fox byline.

Director: Shawn Levy

Writers: Vince Vaughn (screenplay), Jared Stern (screenplay)

Genre: Comedy

Release Date: 07 June 2013

PG Rating: Rated PG-13 for sexuality, some crude humor, partying and language

Runtime: 119 min

IMDB Rating: 6.2/10

Storyline:

Billy (Vince Vaughn) and Nick (Owen Wilson) are salesmen whose careers have been torpedoed by the digital world. Trying to prove they are not obsolete, they defy the odds by talking their way into a coveted internship at Google, along with a battalion of brilliant college students. But, gaining entrance to this utopia is only half the battle. Now they must compete with a group of the nation’s most elite, tech-savvy geniuses to prove that necessity really is the mother of re-invention.

– Written by Twentieth Century Fox

Major Cast:

Vince Vaughn          as            Billy McMahon

Owen Wilson            as            Nick Campbell

Rose Byrne               as            Dana

Aasif Mandvi           as            Mr. Chetty

Max Minghella        as           Graham Hawtrey

Josh Brener             as            Lyle

Dylan O’Brien          as            Stuart

Box Office:

The Internship, the comedy featuring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn as fortysomething interns at Google, came in at No. 4 in the box office this weekend, marking an underwhelming launch.

The film earned $18.1 million over the weekend, according to Box Office Mojo. That puts it behind Ethan Hawke sci-fi thriller The Purge, which placed at No. 1 with $36.4 million, and Fast & Furious 6 and Now You See Me, with $19.8 million and $19.5 million, respectively. The Internship opening also paled in comparison to Wilson and Vaughn’s last big film, The Wedding Crashers, which brought in $33.9 million in its opening weekend in 2005.

Reviews for the movie have also been disappointing. The Internship received a 33% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Many reviews took issue with Google’s involvement in the film. The New York Times called the film a “two-hour commercial for GoogleWorld masquerading as an aspirational buddy comedy,” while RogerEbert.com said the film “[glorifies] Google as both a successful company and a mystical entity that makes the world a better place. This sentiment is treated without irony.”

Google allowed a great deal of access to The Internships’s filmmakers. During Google I/O, CEO Larry Page explained that the company’s involvement with the film aimed to make engineers into heroes. “They were making a movie we decided we’d get involved,” he said, explaining that computer science has an image problem in which techies are seen as “nerdy curmudgeons.” However, in The Internship, a tech-savvy Google employee character is “by far the coolest character in the movie.”