"I still haven't watched The Interview yet because of credible threats from reviewers." -Andy Kindler
I imagine that before seeing The Interview became an act of patriotism, it was a better movie. On its own terms, it's charming and often laugh-out-loud funny. But it's not the champion for free speech that recent controversy has painted it as, nor is it in a class with the best comedies that have played against real-life political backdrops, like To Be Or Not To Be or The Great Dictator, or even Team America: World Police, the Trey Parker/Matt Stone puppet comedy, also set in North Korea.
It's a smart comedy about two dumb guys who are charged with assassinating a dictator. It might have been funnier if it were a smart comedy about two smart guys. It is, thankfully, not a celebration of the Ugly American tourist who lords his American exceptionalism over lesser furr'ners. It takes a more surprising if less ambitious route and becomes a benign plea for good journalism in the face of unquestioned despotism.
But that's the movie's secondary ambition. It's primarily a series of teenage boy jokes at the expense of the manhood (and heterosexuality) of its two lead characters, played by James Franco and Seth Rogen. The gags are funny, if more juvenile than they need to be. The elevation that the film received from its alleged targeting by North Korea unfortunately raised expectations that the film didn't meet.
Dave Skylark (Franco) is the host of a vapid talk show that specializes in encouraging celebrities to reveal their deepest secrets. The opening scene, probably the funniest in the movie, has Skylark unwittingly prompting Eminem to come out of the closet (Mr. Mathers, it should be said, delivers an excellent deadpan performance). When producer Aaron Rapaport (Rogen) demands that the show be taken in a more relevant direction, Skylark seizes upon a newspaper article which claims that North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-un is a fan of his show. The two secure an interview with the dictator, leading a CIA agent (Lizzy Caplan) to knock on their door and charge them with "taking him out."
Rogen and his directing partner Evan Goldberg set such a high bar with their debut film, This is the End, that it wasn't unreasonable to expect a thoughtful, complex, honest comedy about North Korea and the concept of assassination in general. This is the End started out as a simple bro comedy and expanded far beyond that; The Interview goes the other way. Early scenes promise a clever satire, but the rest of the movie is more concerned with the emasculation of its heroes and of its villain. Not that the two are mutually exclusive--This is the End had plenty of bodily humor inside of its spiritual context--but by the end of The Interview, it seems that nothing has really been said, other than (1) hey, y'all, world leaders shouldn't be worshiped as gods, and (2) despite what you may have heard, Kim Jong-un has an anus.
As the enigmatic leader, Randall Park gives the most complex, interesting performance in the film, probably better than Mr. Kim deserves. If anything, his regime has more to gain from this film than to lose; though his character has many embarrassing revelations--not the least of which is his closet affinity for Katy Perry--his character here is far more intelligent, tenacious, and crafty than the timid, oddball daddy's boy that much of the world sees.
Unfortunately he's not well met by Franco and Rogen, who give two of their lazier performances. Franco plays Dave Skylark as what Ben Stiller might have described as "full r-word," when his character might have been more interesting as a clever but shallow opportunist. Rogen doesn't have much of a character at all, other than as the harried straight-man to Franco's hysterics. Women also don't have much of a role in the film, though Diana Bang is a promising talent as Kim's straight-arrow press secretary. Lizzy Caplan is unfortunately wasted, disappearing for most of the film's second half, but very few actresses are better at playing the straight woman, and it's largely her doing that early "training" sequences for Dave and Aaron are sometimes uproarious.
Because Rogen and Goldberg are expert comedians, much of the lowbrow humor works. I found myself laughing more than I expected at a scene in which Aaron, threatened by Kim's guards and a Siberian tiger, has to hide an important package in a very uncomfortable place. Kim's casual seduction of Dave (likely paralleling the real-life Dennis Rodman visit) is a hoot. The deadpan performances from James Yi and Paul Bae as stiffshirted North Korean guards lead to some of the film's best uncomfortable laughs.
But Rogen and Goldberg, probably unaware that their film would be elevated to national icon, are content to be merely funny without being provocative. The controversy surrounding the film only reminds us how much better it could have been. It flirts enough with the complexities of the place of North Korea in world politics for us to know that it has a brain in its head; it just doesn't use it.
** 1/2 out of ****
No comments:
Post a Comment