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

Review #659: 'This Is the End' (2013)

We all know the comedy formula by now - obnoxious man-child goes about his business until a life-changing event (i.e. a girl) teaches him the way of the world so that we gradually learn that he's really quite sweet after all. It's a cliché fully embraced by silver screen comedy megastars like Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell and Jack Black. Audiences, clearly comfortable with predictability, flock to see their hugely profitable films, because, as bad as their movies tend to be, they are still loveable actors. Judd Apatow and his entourage of actors - although they have made their fair share of bad movies too - seem unsatisfied with simply offering the same thing over and over again. First-time directors Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen here give us a strange and dangerously self-indulgent end-of-the-world comedy with some of Hollywood's most famous offering themselves up for lampooning, resulting in a Marmite movie that I believe is the funniest of the year so far.

L.A.-loathing Jay Baruchel arrives at the airport to be greeted by his lifelong buddy Seth Rogen. The two go home and smoke some weed, and eventually head over to James Franco's new Hollywood mansion for an A-list party. Baruchel doesn't want to go because Jonah Hill will be there, and Jonah is apparently an arsehole. While Rogen mixes with his new Hollywood buddies, Baruchel mopes on his own and watches Craig Robinson sing 'take yo' panties off!' with Rihanna. But as Baruchel and Rogen go to the store for some munchies, beams of light suddenly start sucking people up into heaven, and the ground below them starts to open. It seems the Rapture has passed them by and the apocalypse is upon them. Holed up in Franco's mansion as demonic monsters prowl outside, they must survive starvation, Emma Watson wielding an axe, an exorcism, and most of all, an uninvited Danny McBride.

With disaster movies opening every other week these days, the vision of the apocalypse brought by Goldberg and Rogen is actually rather well done. A coked-up Michael Cera, who is previously seen receiving some oral assistance in a bathroom, is given a particularly gruesome death, while the likes of Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Jason Segel and Paul Rudd are sucked into wormholes in the ground. It would seem obvious to most normal people as to what these idiots need to do to escape their predicament, but they are far too self-absorbed to realise. It's funny how aware these actors are of their public perception, and they fully embrace it. So Rogen is ribbed for playing the same guy in every movie and is practically always seen with a joint in his mouth; Franco is the robe-wearing, art-collecting 'pretentious nerd' (as McBride labels him); Hill is subtly creepy; Robinson is just an extremely nice guy; and McBride is psychotic and selfish. Baruchel, it seems, is the only 'normal' one, completely untainted by Hollywood.

But the point here is not that Hollywood is evil or that Hollywood corrupts the soul. I don't really know what it's about, but at it's centre there is the relatable story of lifelong friends that have grown apart, but are still desperately clinging onto that special bond they share. And it is this that makes the film so engrossing. The humour is as bad taste as you would expect (at one point, Franco and McBride threaten each other with ejaculation), but it's the emotional core that dilutes all the cock jokes and gives the movie such much-needed humanity. It won't be for everybody, and some of the general strangeness will go over a lot of audience's heads. Goldberg and Rogen have clearly seen far too many movies and therefore throw everything but the kitchen sink at the film, but I found this a completely unexpected joy, and an original one at that. Although it gets a bit too ridiculous at the climax, the end note will have a big part of the audience screaming with pleasure with a cameo or five by some unexpected guests.


Directed by: Evan Goldberg, Seth Rogen
Starring: Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, Danny McBride, Emma Watson, Michael Cera
Country: USA

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie