The Internship: Selling audiences on Googliness

Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson hammed it up together in the 2005 flick Wedding Crashers and The Internship is a rather belated attempt to replicate that magic. The film has received mostly negative reviews, but it’s hardly the worst thing to come out this summer. Vaughn and Wilson do a reasonable job of keeping the comedy steadily coming and are solid as two older dudes struggling to understand the millennial mindset.

As the movie commences, Billy (Vaughn) and Nick (Wilson) have just been laid off from their long-running gigs as traveling watch salesmen. They’re not sure what to do next and for a minute Nick starts selling mattresses with his sister’s boyfriend (Will Ferrell, making a cameo). Billy, however, gets them an internship at Google and they head over to the company’s high tech headquarters where they learn that the best team of summer interns will win full-time jobs. At first, they’re completely out of the sync with their teammates, most of whom are young enough to be their sons or daughters. Despite the fact that most of their cultural references go back to the ’80s, their personalities eventually begin to win their teammates over. The team works together to challenge Graham (Max Minghella), a highly competitive computer geek who has his eyes on the prize.

Along the way, Nick develops a thing for Dana (Rose Byrne), a hard-working executive who has put her personal life on hold so that she can devote all her time to working long hours at the office. It’s all very formulaic (and certainly owes a debt to The Bad News Bears), but that’s part of the film’s charm. And it does a nice job of showing that adults can’t fear technology or self-reinvention while demonstrating to millennials that real-life experience can still count for something in a world where interacting in a virtual world is privileged.