Review #896: 'The Interview' (2014)

The alleged attack on Sony by North Korean cyber-hackers in protest over The Interview's depiction of their divine ruler, Kim Jong-un, did nothing but wonders for the film. Scandalising a film does little more than promote it to a wider audience, so directors Evan Goldberg and Seth Green must have been rubbing their hands together when Sony hit the panic button. It raised questions over the futility of censorship and led to a wonderful middle-finger salute on IMDb, with the average user rating bumped to a perfect 10 before it had even been released. Now that the furore has died down, The Interview can be seen for what it is: a scattershot comedy that raises a few laughs but ultimately lacks the balls required to make a decent satire.

TV producer Aaron Rapaport (Rogen) starts to question his body of work after receiving a dressing down from a former school friend, who is now working on the highly respected 60 Minutes. Aaron works on Skylark Tonight, a glossy chat-show in which his friend Dave Skylark (James Franco) interviews various celebrities about a variety of shallow topics (when rumours break that Matthew McConaughey has been caught having sex with a goat, Dave demands that they get the goat). Dave hears a rumour that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (Randall Park), who is threatening the U.S. with a nuclear attack, is a big fan of the show, so Aaron sees this as the perfect opportunity to cover some serious news and travels to rural China in the hope of arranging a historic interview.

When the two are approached by CIA Agent Lacey (Lizzy Caplan) to assassinate the chubby dictator, an air-tight plan is set in motion that only these two idiots could possibly screw up. A hand plaster containing a deadly ricin strip is all that it will take, but as seen when Dave lets loose a sneeze during a rehearsal, things most likely won't go to plan. The scene is set for comedy set-pieces aplenty, but the film only occasionally hits its mark. Whether this is down to the growing trend of using improvisation for laughs, the over-reliance on dick jokes, or the inclusion of yet another manifestation of the familiar Seth Rogen persona, The Interview rarely rises above amusing. Personally, I find James Franco's crazy-eyed lunacy both hilarious and quite intense at times, but here even the most hardcore Franco fans may have their patience stretched by his over-acting.

Yet, when it's good, it's very good. When Dave is waltzed away for a night of drinking, womanising, bromanctic heart-to-heart's, and listening to Katy Perry in a huge tank, Franco and Park have great chemistry and Park clearly has a fun time with his character, to the point that it becomes difficult to hate Kim even though it becomes clear that he is a master manipulator. It's a perfectly enjoyable experience for the most part, but is too blighted by haphazard plotting and toothless satire to be the film that Goldberg and Rogen are really capable of. Perhaps some more time spent on the script and less time making it up as they went along would have tightened their grip, and some real courage and ambition may have put it in the same league one of cinema's greatest on-the-nose satires, Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940), which left a certain floppy-haired anti-Semite seething


Directed by: Evan Goldberg, Seth Rogen
Starring: James Franco, Seth Rogen, Lizzy Caplan, Randall Park
Country: USA

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie