The Internship

In recent years, pre-show commercials have become more and more prevalent at the cinema. So perhaps it was inevitable that trend would build to something like The Internship, which essentially is a feature-length Google advertisement disguised as a buddy comedy about arrested development.

The idea here is to replicate the chemistry of stars Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, who made Wedding Crashers a surprise box-office smash. But their over-the-top mugging grows tiresome here, especially when the narrative framework is so flimsy to begin with.

Billy (Vaughn) and Nick (Wilson) are longtime friends and colleagues whose success in the realm of old-fashioned face-to-face sales makes them practically obsolete when it comes to the digital age. Out of desperation, the middle-aged duo swallows its pride and is able to secure summer internships at Google despite being twice the average age and possessing almost no knowledge of technological advances.

The unique internship program is based largely on nerdy and eccentric team-building exercises, with Billy and Nick joining a ragtag team of outcasts in a high-stakes competition against promising young tech wizards with full-time employment riding on the outcome. Naturally, it becomes a showdown of sorts between old school and new school.

The film is directed by Shawn Levy (Real Steel) from a script conceived by Vaughn that is lacking in subtlety and surprise. Basically, it’s a one-joke premise with a formulaic ragtag underdog structure that finds Billy and Nick able to talk their way out of any situation.

The Internship could have been a sharp satire about the difficulties of the shifting contemporary job market, and it might have gotten more mileage from its underlying truths about the increasingly narrow generation gap when it comes to technological advances. But it declines those opportunities. The subject matter should be cutting-edge, yet the film feels curiously dated.

There are some broad laughs and amusing character quirks along the way, and the two stars have a natural rapport that makes their characters more likeable than perhaps they should be.

On a broader scale, the film seems less concerned with characters or plot than it does with aggressive product placement, potential online partnerships and promotional tie-ins. But hey, Google looks like a fun place to work. For proof, just look it up on the Internet.

Rated PG-13, 119 minutes.