“Apart from a few funny gags; it’s crass and rather boring.”
SPOILER FREE After the serious controversy with North Korea, and leakage all over the internet – I have to admit that I still wasn’t particularly looking forward to seeing the latest ‘Seth Rogen and James Franco comedy’. As much as I enjoyed and still rather like Judd Apatow’s ‘Knocked Up’ and David Gordon Green’s ‘Pineapple Express’ – this type of crass, slapstick and rather stupid sense of humour has way overstayed its welcome. With this in mind, it was no surprise to me that ‘The Interview’ was a rather failed attempt. We are introduced to Dave Skylark (James Franco) who is a talk show host in the United States for Skylark Tonight – and alongside him there is his producer Aaron Rapoport (Seth Rogen).
I like James Franco rather a lot, particularly stemming from his performance as Harry Osborne in Sam Raimi’s ‘Spider-Man’ trilogy and his cameo’s in some of Judd Apatow’s work, but in ‘The Interview’, his character made me lose my mind. With stupid sarcasm, unfunny jokes and ridiculously rude statements that NO-ONE ever says made him to me one of the most irritating characters presented on-screen in a long time. For the majority of the film I felt like I just wanted to assassinate Dave Skylark and forget what the rest of the film was actually about. As much as I felt the film was a complete narrative mess, it had moments that kept me interested. The balance between Skylark Tonight and Dave and Aaron keeping in contact with the CIA to assassinate Kim Jong-un was well done and certainly the chemistry between the characters – although irritating at times was believable enough.
Am I the only one that is so fed up with these comedies? I can find myself enjoying rude humour if I feel that it’s well placed, but there’s nothing about this film which is a supposed comedy that I found particularly amusing. The chemistry between Seth Rogen and James Franco (although the characters are noticeably different in each film) is exactly the same from feature to feature. The love-hate-slapstick-gag relationship works well enough in ‘Pineapple Express’ but again and again only seems to appear lazy and more boring. The film made me snigger on a couple of occasions, but the laughs are really not as much as one would expect. As offensive I can imagine the film is to North Korea, it was fairly obvious that before you go and see the film you’ll be wondering what on earth the fuss was all about – you’ll think the same when you exit. With a couple of fun parts along the way ‘The Interview’ is overall crass, unoriginal and actually rather boring.
★★
Hudson-Cook 