The 2013 comedy directed by Shawn Levy and written by Jared Stern and Vince Vaughn, who is also one of the two main actors of the movie. It’s the story of two friends, Billy ( Vince Vaughn ) and Nicolas ( Owen Wilson ) who get fired from their jobs and apply for an internship at the search engine you probably found this review on, Google.
PLOT:
They get the news that their company is going out of business from their boss, John Goodman. Billy comes home to a foreclosing sign on his door. His girlfriend being slightly ticked off at it and the fact they haven’t gone to Barcelona. Billy does some Googling around and decides to apply for an internship at, you guessed it because I already wrote it in the description, Google. Mind you, they have 0 experience in the IT field, whatsoever. Nicolas meanwhile, has gotten a job at a matress store, where he gets bossed around by Will Ferrell with tattoos on his neck.
Liscense – https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
After quiting his job with Will Ferrell, the two conduct the interview in a public library. They get accepted for their “unique” answers involving a blender. When they arrive at Google HQ in California, they’re instantly bewildered by the place. The complementary food, the size of the place, everything. The likely hundreds of other interns from all over the US of A along with Vaughn and Wilson, who by the way are all younger then them by about 15-25 years, all divided into groups. The group with the greatest sucess will be guranteed full time jobs at Google.
Billy and Nicolas end up in a group, they call “The Loveable Maniacs”. Consisting of the “leftovers”, those who couldn’t find a group. They are; the phone-loving Stuart ( Dylan O’Brien ), Yo-Yo ( Tobit Raphael ) and Neha ( Tiya Sircar ). Together they are thrown into a series of challenges which they as a group are forced to complete together, despite their differences. Nicolas and Billy acting as the “unique thinkers” of the group. They immediatly achieve a group of rivals, ones who appear to be the most likely winners, the very smart bully types, if you will.
The first challenge; find an audio-related bug in a code. Billy having the wonderful idea to find the code’s writer. Which ends up in them getting beat up by someone they mistook for Charles Xavier. Needless to say, they didn’t win that challenge. Also, due to their generational gap, there are several pop culture references that they don’t understand, and don’t even get that they are pop culture references throughout the film, the Professor X one really being the best example. The second challenge is sports related, which they also lose.
The third challenge is to make an app, whoever gets the most dowloads wins. After a drink fight in da club, they come up with the idea for an app that autocorrects text messages and E-Mails, a way of protecting people from themselves so they don’t send somebody something royally stupid. Surprisingly, it’s a sucess. Them getting ten times more downloads than any other team. The team starting to really come together after Billy and Nicolas actually make a contribution, making it look possible that they might actually win.
The fourth challenge is customer service, Billy and Nick’s previous sales experience not coming in as helpful as they thought. They’re doing genuinally good work, much better than most customer services in real life. It actually looks like they will pulls this off to, if it weren’t that Billy forgot to log into his account. The fifth and final challenge; find a company that isn’t advertising itself on Google, and make them join. They reach out to a local pizza joint and even talk him into franchising. When they arrive at the announcement ceremony, somewhat late. They actually win. After a brief celebration, the Loveable Maniacs part ways. The End.
CONCLUSSION:
Overall, The Internship was an enjoyable little comedy, that probably saved half it’s budget on product placement from Google. I honestly expected this to be a pretty generic storyline with jokes you’ve already seen a dozen times before, which yes, to a certain point it was. It’s supporting charcters had little to no actual characters, making them feel like cardboard stereotypes. Even with all that said, The Internship it still managed to be enjoyable, and was overall just a fun watch that didn’t require you to think. A good choice to watch if you can’t really find anything on Netflix, or Sky, or Amazon Prime, or Hulu, or Disney Plus or one of the other hundreds of streaming services that exist at this point. I’d give this 5.5/10.
-The Screenwriter
PS, happy birthday to Eric Stoltz