Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are both experts at playing confident guys in situations where they have no business being confident. Despite their almost identical acting styles, they play off each other well, seeming like true best buds on screen. That chemistry paid dividends in 2005’s “Wedding Crashers,” and their more pointed (but still quite silly) new movie, “The Internship,” is just as enjoyable.
I’m a sucker for the premise of “The Internship.” While “Wedding Crashers” sets up Vaughn and Wilson as players who intrude on nuptial ceremonies, they are lovable underdogs this time around. Both are great salesmen, but when the wristwatch company that employs them folds, they find themselves jobless, 40-something and possessing an outdated skill. In an inexplicable conceit that I was willing to go with, both are brought on as Google interns.
You can already see the final lesson coming, of course: Old-school salesmanship is a skill that carries over even into the digital age; soak up some new knowledge and you’re good to go. But getting to the film’s conclusion is a lot of fun. Just seeing Vaughn and Wilson as fish out of water among the pool of interns competing for full-time jobs is pretty hilarious. Perhaps “The Internship” takes their cluelessness a bit too far at times; after all, their age shouldn’t necessarily make them guess wrong about workplace dating policies or make them ignorant of “X-Men” lore. Arguably, at their age, they should be pulling the “Professor X” joke on the kids. However, that didn’t stop me from chuckling as Vaughn tries to get the attention of a wheelchair-bound college prof he thinks is named Charles Xavier; the actor does earnestly clueless so well. (It’s even more absurd that Vaughn thinks the term is “on the line” rather than “online.”)
“The Internship” embraces its comedic scenarios, never stopping halfway. Vaughn and Wilson taking their four charges on their first strip-club experience is an obvious joke, yet it’s a blast thanks to the chemistry among the group (I especially adored Tiya Sircar’s Neha, the token girl). In a more original vein, a Quidditch match appears on film for the first time outside of “Harry Potter.” (Yes, there is a real-world version of the game, blending dodgeball and team handball, including the brooms but subtracting the flying.)
Writers Vaughn and Jared Stern don’t go too deeply into it, but the pressures of seeking a job in a bad economy still permeate “The Internship,” giving it a more relatable point than “Wedding Crashers” had. Not only are the two main characters going through job struggles (look for a great Will Ferrell cameo as Wilson desperately takes a job as a mattress salesman), but so are the younger interns. When Vaughn gives a speech about the American dream, they rightly respond that that old notion doesn’t apply in an age of record unemployment for college graduates.
Admittedly, there’s also some fumbling of the point: Vaughn’s and Wilson’s characters don’t seem to have serious financial troubles (they must rack up a significant bill at the strip club) despite the fact that they are unemployed. Furthermore, although Google’s intern handler (veteran character actor Aasif Mandvi) says the competitors will need more than luck to win, there’s an elephant in the room: It’s dumb luck that Vaughn and Wilson get the internship to begin with. A much darker movie could spring from this premise; heck, even “Horrible Bosses” was a downer compared to the mostly upbeat “Internship.”
In the real world, you might not get a job even with the level of confidence, perseverance and self-salesmanship that Vaughn and Wilson possess. I have extremely talented friends who got laid off who still haven’t gotten back into their preferred field. It’s simple math: Some lucky people will get jobs, some unlucky people won’t. In its defense, “The Internship” isn’t saying following your dream always leads to success; it’s saying that sometimes, for some people, it does. And that’s an appealing thing to experience, even if it’s only in a movie theater.