MOVIE REVIEW: The Internship

This extended advertisement for Google hopes to have the same kind of success as stars Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn’s previous collaboration, Wedding Crashers, did.

It won’t. 

Laid off from their job as face-to-face salesmen, Billy (Vaughn) and Nick (Wilson), down on their luck and desperate for a job, apply for an internship at Google’s San Francisco HQ, despite knowing nothing about computers. Once there, they are put into groups and made to complete various Google specific tasks in the hope of being offered a permanent post. If you’ve read that paragraph you’ll know exactly how the movie will play out; and it doesn’t deviate from the template too much.

Our protagonists are teamed up with a walking bunch of clichés; the sarcastic cool kid, the uptight Asian kid, the token girl and the socially awkward nerd. Together after a rocky start they must learn to work as a team if they’re to stand a chance of winning the job of their dreams. The nerds Nick and Billy are teamed up with will learn life lessons and discover there’s more to life than sitting in front of a computer screen, while the nerds will try to bring Billy and Nick into the modern world. It wouldn’t really be a spoiler to tell you the ending of the film. I won’t, but you can take a wild stab.

The two leads are basically playing exactly the same characters they’ve played before, with Vaughn doing his confident motormouth schtick (becoming ever more tiresome) and Wilson the relaxed surfer dude thing (likeable, but boring). Each of the kids, despite having predictable and archetypal roles to play, are endearing rather than annoying even if the Asian kid cutting loose cliché is present and correct here. Rose Byrne barely registers as a Google employee and love interest for Nick. 

Hilarious, said no-one.

It’s as predictable as they come, and sadly there aren’t many laughs to elevate proceedings during the first half of the film; all the jokes are fish-out-of-water gags, like having Billy not knowing how to work a webcam (which might have been funnier ten years ago) or constantly saying ‘on-the-line’ instead of ‘online’ in a joke that goes on far longer than it should. Thankfully, the second half of the film picks up, starting with a Quidditch game of all things, and there are a few decent laugh out loud moments once the film gets it’s set up out of the way.

However, outside of those few big laughs the film is only chucklesome for the most part when you want to be full on belly laughing. The cynical use of Google doesn’t help matters either, being constantly reminded that it’s an ‘amazing place to work’ and continually seeing Google products and Google apps and services everywhere and Google this and Google that makes it feels less of a film and more of a brainwashing exercise first and a comedy second.

Verdict:

A diverting enough 90 minutes, but it won’t live long in the memory.

2 stars

MOVIE REVIEW: World War Z

This movie adaptation of Max Brooks’s book of the same name really only takes the premise of a worldwide zombie pandemic and not much else. The film itself is a disparate mish-mash of a whole load of different genres; political thriller, zombie movie, horror flick, globetrotting spy story and it rolls many of the books characters all into a Brad Pitt shaped ball. Yet somehow, it works.

Pitt stars as Gerry Lane, a former UN envoy who is used to going into extremely dangerous situations, and gets dragged back into service after the undead start to take over. All this information is given to you in the first five minutes because that’s all the time it takes for things to kick off. And they do, in spectacular fashion. This isn’t your usual zombie apocalypse where things slowly but surely get creepier and creepier, where characters start to notice little signs of something strange starting to happen, or where the zombies slowly but surely start to outnumber the living. This is BAM! Zombies are here, right now. There’s a lot of them. And you better run.

The opening scenes of mass panic are hugely effective and really get the heart pumping as Gerry and his family struggle through the crowds trying to get to safety. It shows a world gone to Hell in the first fifteen minutes. The film does well to show just how you’d imagine the world would react to such an outbreak, with a standout scene in a shopping mall with two moments involving a police officer and the other with a showdown with a gunman in a pharmacy being highlights. These little moments of humanity really help the film.

When the film eventually settles down is when the cracks start to appear; the scenes with Gerry and his family are perfunctory at best, when all you really want to get back to is more zombie carnage. But thankfully it doesn’t take long. With Gerry flying all over the world to find answers and possibly a cure we’re treated to a variety of locales in which you don’t normally see zombies; a run down military base shrouded in fog for one. And when the zombies do arrive en masse, surging through the streets of Jerusalem in the films standout scene, charging after the living with not a care for themselves, knocking over buses, smashing their bodies into windows and walls to eat the juicy humans on the other side, they’re like a tidal wave of death, and their sheer speed and numbers is TERRIFYING. 

Terrifying.

Smartly, after so many scenes of mass hysteria the film doesn’t go over the top for the climax, culminating instead with a quieter but no less tense set piece that wrings maximum tension from it’s sparse surroundings. Much has been written about the troubled production of the film and how the ending was hastily rewritten. And while, yes, it is a little on the cheesy side it also works (Although I could have done without the Moses parallels).

A small criticism would be that the film feels very by the numbers, as the whole film could be summed up by ‘Brad Pitt goes here, finds a clue, zombies show up, he just escapes, repeat to end’ which makes it feel very much like a video game. But you’ll forgive it as whenever the zombies do show up, those scenes are too exciting to care. Another minor complaint is that despite being a 15 rated film, there’s nothing here that looks particularly worthy of the rating. It’s a zombie film with zero gore or gruesome scenes. I should point out that it doesn’t need them, the film works fine as it is, but certain moments do feel as though they’ve been watered down a touch and feels more like a 12A film than a 15. And at a few points (although not many), the CG joins detract from the spectacle, but not enough to spoil the enjoyment of seeing millions of zombies attacking cities.

Verdict:

Fans of the book (myself included) might feel a little short changed but the film is scary when it wants to be, tense as hell in parts, and hugely ambitious in its scale combining elements of Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (global pandemic) with the crazy zombie carnage of Zack Synder’s Dawn of the Dead remake. World War Z does more right than wrong.

4 stars