'Internship' has no full-time offers

How much did Google pay to get a two-hour advertisement starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson?

Better yet, how much did 20th Century Fox have to pay these two actors to pick up a script that was so clearly below any A-list actor? What was the demographic for this movie — the 18 to 24-year-olds who had seen the much funnier “Wedding Crashers” starring the two leads almost eight years ago, or the pre-teens who are just feeling content being at a PG-13 comedy?

These are the questions running through my mind after watching “The Internship.”

It seems that the creative team behind “The Internship” dug up every comedy script from the past decade and spun it around with the San Francisco-based Google being the fresh and innovative setting. And by fresh and innovative, I mean contrived and completely unessential.

No, what Google turns out to be is just a stage for Vaughn and Wilson to play off each other, to show us that old dogs can, in fact, teach new dogs tricks, and to star in their own film — one that is wholly unentertaining and a “comedy” that just isn’t funny.

The laughs were few, far between and less laugh-out-loud outbursts, more slight chuckles.

The 119-minute comedy runs about 30 minutes too long. It’s almost as if director Shawn Levy is apologizing to us for having to pay $10 to see this flub by giving us too much poor-quality film.

“The Internship” follows two middle-aged salesmen who’ve just lost their jobs as they find themselves at an internship with prestigious Google pitted up against kids half their age. As predictably as possible, the kids who resented Vaughn and Wilson for weighing them down at the beginning of the movie end up warming up to them, learning from them, and of course...the underdogs take the top prize of the coveted full-time careers at Google.

I would warn you of spoilers at the top of this paragraph, but it would insult your intelligence to believe that you couldn’t predict that just by watching the trailer.

All “The Internship” left me with was a longing for the 2010 “The Social Network” — a movie that actually uses all the massive potential of showing the onscreen relationship between the Internet and its human architects.

In fact, there’s a good idea. Stay home, save your money, and watch that again...or any other movie that will save you from wasting your money on this cliché comedy.