The Internship (2013)

[Herminia Remmen]

TheInternship is a 2013 American comedy film directed by Shawn Levy, written by Vince Vaughn and Jared Stern, and produced by Vaughn and Levy. The film stars Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson as recently laid-off salesmen who attempt to compete with much younger and more technically skilled applicants for a job at Google. Rose Byrne, Max Minghella, Aasif Mandvi, Josh Brener, Dylan O'Brien, Tobit Raphael, Tiya Sircar, Josh Gad, and Jessica Szohr also star.

After salesmen Billy McMahon and Nick Campbell's employer goes out of business, Billy applies for Google internships for them both. They are accepted due to their unorthodox interview answers, despite a lack of relevant experience and not being of traditional collegiate age.

They will spend the summer competing in teams against other interns in a variety of tasks, with only members of the winning team guaranteed jobs with Google. Billy and Nick's team is led by Lyle, who constantly tries to act hip to hide his insecurities, and its other members are seen as rejects: the smartphone-addicted Stuart, the tiger-parented Filipino Yo-Yo, and Indian American nerd-related kink enthusiast Neha.

Although Stuart, Yo-Yo, and Neha find Billy and Nick useless in the initial tasks, Billy rallies the team in a comeback that unifies them in a game of quidditch. However, the team loses after an intern of the opposing team, Graham, cheats.

When teams are tasked with developing an app, Billy and Nick convince their teammates to indulge in a wild night out, which includes going to a strip club. Lyle's drunken antics inspire them to create an app that guards against reckless phone usage while drunk, and win the task by earning the most downloads.

Meanwhile, Nick has been flirting with an executive, Dana, with little success. When he begins attending technical presentations to impress her, he develops an interest in the material. Dana agrees to go on a date with Nick, and she invites him in at the end of the evening.

While the teams prepare to staff the technical support hotline, Billy is offered technical information by an introvert named "Headphones", which helps him. However, the team loses because Billy fails to log his calls for review. Dejected, he leaves the Google campus and pursues a job selling mobility scooters.

In the final task, which is a sales challenge, teams must sign the largest possible company to begin advertising with Google. Nick approaches Billy with an inspiring speech, encouraging him to return and help the team for the last challenge. Reinvigorated, Billy leads them to convince a local pizzeria owner how Google can help him interact with potential customers and thereby expand his business, while remaining true to his professional values.

Chetty is about to announce that Graham's team has won, when Billy, Nick, and their team arrive to give a dynamic presentation about their new client. Chetty recognizes that although the pizzeria is not a large business, its potential is limitless because it is expanding via technology. Graham protests and is dressed down by Headphones, who turns out to be the head of Google Search. Nick and Billy's team win the challenge and the guaranteed jobs, while Graham is punched by an overweight member of his team whom he has constantly bullied.

As the students depart, Nick and Dana are still seeing each other, as are Lyle and Google's dance instructor Marielena. Stuart and Neha have formed a romantic connection as well with Stuart promising to see her in person rather than texting her, and Yo-Yo asserts himself to his mother.

Most of the scenes were filmed in Atlanta, Georgia, and at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which posed as a double for the Googleplex, since the company normally does not allow filming on the actual Googleplex for security and productivity reasons.[4] Vaughn came up with the idea after watching a 60 Minutes segment on Google's work culture, and subsequently brought the idea to director Shawn Levy.[5] Google agreed to work with the film producers, with founder Larry Page noting that "computer science has a marketing problem."[6] Google also felt it would help further explain their "Don't be evil" mantra.[6] Although Reuters reported that as part of the deal Google asked for "creative control", Levy denied the company was involved with the script, insisting that Google only assisted from a "technical" perspective.[5] CNN reported that the studio did give "some control" to Google over the depiction of its products.[6]

On Rotten Tomatoes, The Internship has an approval rating of 35% based on 170 reviews and an average rating of 5.00/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "The Internship weighs down Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson's comic charisma with a formulaic script and padded running time that leans far too heavily on its stars' easygoing interplay."[7] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 42 out of 100 based on 36 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[8] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade "B+" on an A+ to F scale.[9]

Another critique was that combining Vaughn and Wilson with Google was poorly timed, and that the film would have been much more successful, had it been released on the heels of Vaughn and Wilson's success in 2005's Wedding Crashers. This fact of timing was satirized by a video news story run by The Onion, a satirical newspaper, titled "The Internship Poised to be Biggest Comedy of 2005".[15]

The Internship was released in "Unrated" form on DVD and Blu-ray Combo Pack on October 22, 2013.[17] This edition runs 125 minutes and contains profanity and nudity not found in the theatrical release.

In one of the early scenes in "The Internship," heroes Billy and Nick (Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson) have a video-conference interview with two recruiters from Google at a computer in a public library. Billy and Nick are two forty-something wristwatch salesmen who lost their jobs when their company folded (nobody uses watches anymore). Both men are now adrift in a world that has passed them by. After a long night of sadly Googling the "jobs for people with no skills", Vaughn's Billy stumbles upon Google's competitive internship program and signs up himself and his buddy Nick for an interview. Batting away the children who want to get on the public computer, Billy and Nick shout at top-volume into the screen, despite the fact that they are told by the recruiters, "Guys, we can hear you". Billy and Nick jam their heads close together like an old vaudeville team posing for a manic promotional photograph and jabber right into the camera, exuding not only obvious technical incompetence but blatantly embarrassing need.

Directed by Shawn Levy and written by Vince Vaughn and Jared Stern, "The Internship" stuffs some creaky gear-shifts and boring exposition in its first 15 minutes; even Will Ferrell's one scene falls a little flat. But the Google interview is the moment the film explodes. The energy is uproarious.

Billy and Nick (miraculously, after that debacle of an interview), are chosen to join the Internship summer program at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. They will compete with other "Nooglers" (that's what they're called, don't blame me!) for the coveted positions offered to only a couple of interns at the end of the summer. Billy and Nick, of course, are the oldest people in any room at Google. The college kids assigned to their team immediately treat them with scorn and disrespect, with good reason: Billy, in trying to describe an idea he has for an App (an idea that already exists, of course), keeps saying that after you take the picture with your phone, you put it "on the line".

The internship program is run by a Mr. Chetty, played wonderfully by Aasif Mandvi as a Google version of Lou Gossett, Jr.'s drill sergeant in "An Officer and a Gentleman." Mr. Chetty is cold, frightening, and unapproachable. The other members of Billy and Nick's team are played by Tiya Sircar, Dylan O'Brien, Tobit Raphael, and Josh Brener. The script delineates every character smartly, following them on similar journeys of transformation over the course of the summer. Tobit Raphael is Yo Yo, a kid so pressured by his mother to be the best that he picks at his eyebrows (by the end of the film he only has one eyebrow). Tiya Sircar plays a bubbly young woman who talks a big game about her sexy "cosplay", only to reveal in a later scene that she's never had a boyfriend, and all her experiences are figments of her imagination. Dylan O'Brien's Stewart is a serious young man who can barely drag his eyes up from his phone; he displays the practical cynicism of a generation that knows that graduating from college is not a guarantee of anything.

The team does not bond immediately, and nobody wants Billy or Nick slowing them down. It's tense. But during a ferocious Quidditch match with a rival team, filmed with the intensity of a World Cup final, Billy gives an inspirational speech to his team about a "little welder girl" who wanted to go to dance school and never gave up. It's extremely stupid and extremely enjoyable, and the team bonds and comes from behind to almost win the match. They start to work together. Billy and Nick play catch-up in terms of technology, and, of course, the old geezers have a couple of life lessons to teach the young whippersnappers, too. Everybody wins.

The movie depicts Google culture as if it were a benevolent version of life in a cult compound, with everyone wearing colored beanies and "Noogle" T-shirts, riding colorful Google bikes around the campus, and taking the Google shuttle bus into town. The interns compete in different challenges: coding, answering helpline calls, locating bugs. It's hard to believe that a scene about answering a Google helpline could be a gripping cliffhanger, but Levy and his cast pull it off.

There are a couple of problems with the material, none of which ended up mattering much to me. One is the glorification of Google as both a successful company and a mystical entity that makes the world a better place. This sentiment is treated without irony. The food is free at the commissary! There are "nap pods" where you can rest! There's a gigantic slide between floors! It's the best place ever! Another potential hitch is that Billy and Nick are angling for an anonymous entry-level job at a gigantic corporation that's hardly the Emerald City that everyone seems to think it is. How long would these two last in homogenized corporate culture, anyway? Do they really want to become a Noogler, filled with "Googleyness"? Their enthusiasm doesn't quite track.

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