The Internship (**1/2)

Essentially a vehicle for Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson to do their shtick, this high-concept comedy has them playing laid-off salemen who become the oldest interns at Google. The plot is equal parts reality show — the interns organize into teams for a series of challenges — and Google infomercial. Vaughn gets a cowriter credit too, as he did on Couples Retreat.

It makes sense to pair Vaughn and Wilson, who have somewhat similar personae and successfully teamed up for Wedding Crashers in 2005.  In most of their movies, they’re runny-mouthed schmoozers, or loud-mouthed bullshitters. Vaughn swaggers, giving off the air of someone trying to put one over on you, while Wilson squirms, like he’s trying to get out from under you, so they complement each other too. Depending on the role, they find that they can schmooze their way through things, or find that bullshit isn’t enough. This starts out in the first mode, switches to the second, teeters, and ultimately winds up somewhere in the middle, which makes it tolerable. That is to say, the movie doesn’t entirely elevate social skills over technical ones, even if it does make the latter seem easy to acquire over the course of a summer.

Vince/Owen (or Billy/Nick) wind up with a team of misfits, who nonetheless still look down on the old guys. Vince/Billy does a kind-of-funny bit where he tries to sell them on his idea for an app that’s exactly like Instagram. It goes on slightly too long, as does the part where the team (including the lone female) goes to a strip club. Actually, I could have done without that part altogether, but all comedies like this need a crazy-night-out scene. A villain also seems to be required, so director Shawn Levy (Date Night, Night at the Museum) makes one of the interns into a English-accented meanie, there solely to lob periodic jibes at the Vince/Owen team, though there’s no particular reason he’d be paying attention to them at all. Liberally applying social lubricant, the old guys gradually win over their nerdy coworkers. Owen/Nick has a perfunctory romance with one of the executives (Rose Byrne). She tells him, “It’s never going to happen,” which in real life usually means, “It’s never going to happen,” but hardly ever does in movies about runny-mouthed schmoozers. This is a perfunctory comedy, but it’s perfectly watchable.

IMDb link

 viewed 5/30/13 7:30 at The Pearl [PFS screening] and reviewed 5/31–6/6/13