Review: The Interview
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
The Interview is not a good movie — but it'll prove to be a memorable one, for very weird, very American reasons.
City Paper grade: C
Decades from now, when we sit our android grandkids down on our bionic space knees and bore them with sprawling stories of 2014, we can lead with a tall tale that just so happens to be true: It was the year a milky bong hit of a film filled with rectum jokes soaked geopolitics in gas and struck a match. By all standards, The Interview is not a good movie — but it'll prove to be a memorable one, for very weird, very American reasons.
There's no point complaining that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's embattled action-comedy failed to live up to the hype stoked by the Sony cyberattack and the studio's weaksauce response. That'd be lazy and reactionary. The most reasonable course is to watch with two simple questions in mind: Does it have value as social satire, as its stars have insisted? (Absolutely not.) And is it funny? (Kinda, sometimes.)
A Billy Bush-like twerp with a frat pledge's sense of humor, James Franco is chat-show host Dave Skylark, who's made a name conducting bullshit celebrity interviews over the course of a decade. Rogen, as Skylark's dedicated producer, enjoys the success, but longs to chew on more serious stories. He gets his wish when Kim Jong-un, an apparent Skylark superfan, agrees to sit down for a televised interview in North Korea.
The CIA's recruitment of the slack-jawed duo to knock off the supreme leader, of course, is what got us into this mess, but it's actually the least offensive aspect of Dan Sterling's screenplay. While detractors stay busy debating the appropriateness of an on-screen assassination, the script manages to turn North Korea's very real problems — poverty, famine, prison camps — into coarse punchlines, bookended by half-assed gay and toilet jokes. This tone deafness, and not the forced edginess of the greater premise, is really what makes The Interview stink.
For what it's worth, Korean-American actor Randall Park, so funny in his minor role on HBO's Veep, turns in a surprisingly layered performance as Kim. Hopefully it'll lead to more post-racial parts prioritizing his comedic chops.
