Though not at all groundbreaking, Shawn Levy's ("Real Steel") "The Internship" is an underdog comedy more relatable than most, given the premise of a frightening job market and the cutthroat competition for college grads.
When two 40-somethings, Billy (Vince Vaughn, "The Watch") and Nick (Owen Wilson, "Midnight in Paris") lose their sales jobs at a company that has gone out of business, they find themselves jobless and relatively skilless.
After both of their efforts to find work fail, Billy and Nick apply to, and land, internships at Google.
Upon their arrival in Silicon Valley, the two friends are predictably placed on the intern team of misfits and rejects: Team Lyle.
And, like in any underdog comedy, Team Lyle is pitted against a team of aggressively over-achieving jerks.
The portrayal of Billy and Nick as less-than-tech-savvy adults is completely over the top, but that's what this movie is: It's an over-the-top, good-natured comedy.
Despite some excessive scenes, such as when Billy and Nick lead the interns to a strip club and end up in a wild bar fight, the humor is good for an easy laugh.
Another scene showcased Google employees (B.J. Novak, "The Office" and Karen Ceesay, "Trouble With the Curve") interviewing Billy and Nick for the internship position, resulting in some of the movie's funniest moments.
However, a downside of the humor in "The Internship" surfaces in the same interview scene: Some of the jokes are initially quite funny, but they go on too long and losing the humor.
Both the protagonists and antagonists of "The Internship" are nerds. But the screenplay, which was also written by Vaughn (with Jared Stern, "The Watch"), does not let nerds get boring.
Sure, the characters are still all one-dimensional. But in the screenplay, Vaughn and Stern manage to deconstruct and embellish many different facets of the nerd stereotype: the Cosplay nerd, the socially awkward nerd, the nerd that never gets off his electronic device, the nerd with overly demanding parents and a few others.
In "The Internship," Google is more than a setting
