The Internship movie review

Went to see the preview of this movie with my husband at L/B Odeon this evening and we were pleasantly surprised.  I had expected it to be really naff with canned laughter and copious amounts of toilet humour, and yes, there is some toilet humour in there, but it was appropriate to the character.

The basic premise is that two salesmen get let go from their jobs selling watches because of the digital age and they decide to apply for an internship at Google, where they have to compete against young, tech-savvy geniuses for a chance of a job.  Vince Vaughn (Dodgeball, Wedding Crashers)plays Billy McMahon, but he also wrote the story and co-wrote the screenplay and you can feel it, as the film does feel like Dodgeball meets Wedding Crashers.  The film has similar humour, feel-good factor family friendliness and makes use of the tried and tested comedic partnership with Owen Wilson (Cars, Night at the Museum), who plays Nick Campbell, Billy's fellow-fired best mate.

There are some good cameos from John Goodman, Will Ferrell and briefly B. J. Novak (Ryan from the US The Office), but the film really kicks into gear once the pair enter the internship process.  At first the dinosaur/nerd dynamic feels forced and clichéd, but then when the teams are formed, the movie moves onto familiar ground.  Nick's character falls for prickly Google Manager Dana (Rose Byrne of X-Men First Class, Insidious) and Billy's motor-mouth gets him noticed by both the super-competitive interns and the eagle-eyed boss.  Aasif Mandvi (The Dictator, Spiderman 2) puts in an excellent turn as Mr Chetty and Max Minghella (Agora, The Social Network) does a very good stuck-up/mean Graham Hawtrey - the film makes it easy for you to root for the pair as they pit against Graham and try to impress Mr Chetty in the various team challenges.

For some inexplicable reason Google employee Lyle (Josh Brener of Glory Days, The Condom Killer) is given Billy and Nick's team (made up of Dylan O'Brien's Stuart, Tiya Sircar's Neha and Tobit Raphael's Yo-Yo Santos) to mentor and this is where the film really begins to resemble Dodgeball, when Billy's character helps to bring the mismatched interns together.

Mr Vaughn has taken the winning formula of Dodgeball and Wedding Crashes and written a script that could stand to be more involved, but the end result is a family-friendly fun movie that we enjoyed.

'They're crashing the system'                                                               7/10

#TheInternship