The Internship

Back in 2005 Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson teamed up for one of the funniest movies of the noughties with Wedding Crashers. It was rude, brash and explicit, while also being well acted, kinda smart and, most of all, very funny. The Internship is absolutely none of those things.

This time round, Vaughn and Wilson play two salesmen who have just been fired by their boss (John Goodman), and their severance package includes informing them just how out-of-touch they are with modern life. While Googling new job vacancies, they happen across an internship within Google itself, and having haphazardly done rather well in the interview, soon find themselves on Google's HQ campus, competing against 100 other interns for the few full-time positions that are available.

The Internship is basically a Nerds VS Jocks college comedy, except it's not set on a college campus, and EVERYONE is a nerd. So Vaughn and Wilson find themselves teamed up with a nerd version of a gruff loner, a nerd version of a promiscuous nympho, and a nerd version of … a nerd, and they must combine their nerdy Breakfast Club powers in order to defeat the nerd version of a quarterback bully.

The primary problem with The Internship is that it's just not funny. Vaughn and Wilson go off on lengthy, rambling ad-libs which are rarely humorous, and it's clear that director Shawn Levy - the man behind such unfunniness as Night At The Museum, Date Night, Cheaper By The Dozen and The Pink Panther - has absolutely no idea how to rein them in. Their believable bromance is far and away the only plus-side to the movie, especially since they're surrounded by almost universally unlikeable supporting characters.

Most of the jokes seem to stem from "Old people don't get the internet", and while that's fine to an extent, asking us to believe that these "old men" (they're in their 40s, not their 80s) haven't heard of The X-Men or Harry Potter is a bit much. The jokes are too obvious, and almost none of them seem to land. You should know that when you've got an extended cameo from Will Ferrell and you still can't raise a chuckle from the audience, you're in real trouble.