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Plot[ edit]
Billy McMahon and Nick Campbell seek employment after being laid off from their positions as watch salesmen when their employer goes out of business. Billy then applies for an internship at Google for the two of them, and they are accepted due to their unorthodox interview answers, despite a lack of relevant experience. They are the only interns not of traditional collegiate age. They will spend the summer competing in teams against other interns, also known as "Nooglers", in a variety of tasks, and only the members of the winning team will be guaranteed jobs with Google. Billy and Nick are teamed with other interns seen as rejects: Stuart, who is usually engrossed in his smart phone; Yo-Yo, a Filipino-American who was homeschooled by a stereotypical overbearing Asian mother; and Neha, an Indian-American who is an enthusiast of nerd-related kink. The team is led by Lyle, who constantly tries to act hip in order to hide his insecurities. Another intern, Graham, bullies Billy and Nick's team. Mr. Chetty, the head of the internship program, also expresses his doubts about the older men's abilities. Stuart, Yo-Yo, and Neha see Billy and Nick as useless during a task focused on debugging and send them on a wild goose chase to find the fictional character, Professor X. But later, during a game of quidditch against Graham's team, Billy rallies his team to a comeback that unifies them as a team despite ultimately losing after Graham cheats.
When the teams are tasked with developing an app, Billy and Nick convince the team to indulge in a wild night out. At a strip club in San Francisco's Chinatown District, Neha admits to Billy that, despite pher rich fantasy life, she has no real-world experience and is nervous. With his support, she decides to stay. Nick gets Yo-Yo to break out of his shell by drinking and receiving lap dances. And, eli ncouraged by Billy, Lyle approaches one of the dancers, Marielena, who is also a dance instructor at Google on whom he had developed a crush. She is charmed by him, but another customer challenges Lyle for her attention and a fight breaks out. The team is ejected from the club. Before sunrise that same night, overlooking theGolden Gate Bridge, Stuart learns to appreciate his surroundings, and Lyle's drunken antics inspire the team to create an app that guards against reckless phone usage while drunk. They win the task by earning the most downloads.
Meanwhile, Nick has been flirting with an executive, Dana, with little success. When he begins attending technical presentations to impress her, he develops an interest in the material. While the teams prepare to staff the technical support hotline, only Billy feels at a loss. A Google employee, "Headphones", who always wears headphones and never socializes, approaches Billy and tells him that the way he interacts with people is special. He tutors Billy on the technical information. Dana agrees to go on a date with Nick, and she invites him in at the end of the evening. During the task, Billy is comfortable with the material, but his team receives no score because he failed to properly log his calls for review. Dejected, Billy leaves Google to pursue a new sales opportunity with his former boss. The final task is announced as a sales challenge. Teams must sign the largest possible company to begin advertising with Google. The team is stunned when Nick tells them that Billy has left, and they declare that they do not want to do the task without him. Nick convinces Billy to return, and Billy leads the team to show a local pizzeria owner how Google can help him interact with potential customers and thereby expand his business, while remaining true to his professional values.
Back at Google headquarters, Chetty is about to award Graham's team, given Lyle's team's non-attendance, when suddenly the screen behind him lights up - Lyle's team dancing with giant Afros to Irene Cara's "Flashdance... What a Feeling", while Billy arrives throwing pizza at everyone. Chetty recognizes that although the pizzeria is not a large business, its potential is limitless because it is expanding via technology. Graham protests and is dressed down by Headphones, who turns out to be the head of Google Search. Nick, Billy, Stuart, Yo-Yo, and Neha are declared the winners and will receive jobs at Google, which the latter three will start after their senior years in college. A furious Graham berates his team for failing to contribute, but Zach, the obese member of the team, has had enough of his bullying and stands up to him by giving Graham a blow to the chest like Graham did to him during the Quidditch match. As the students depart, Nick and Dana are still seeing each other, as are Lyle and Marielena. Stuart and Neha have formed a romantic connection as well. And Yo-Yo asserts himself to his mother (supported wholeheartedly by his father).
Billy gives Nick a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle Bourbon as a gift and the two walk off campus, toasting the summer as the film ends.
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Cast[edit]
Interns
* Vince Vaughn as Billy McMahon * Owen Wilson as Nick Campbell * Max Minghella as Graham Hawtrey * Tiya Sircar as Neha Patel * Dylan O'Brien as Stuart Twombly * Tobit Raphael as Yo-Yo Santos
Google staff * Rose Byrne as Dana Simms * Josh Brener as Lyle Spaulding * Aasif Mandvi as Mr. Roger Chetty * Josh Gad as Andrew Anderson ("Headphones") * Eric André as Sid
Others
* John Goodman (uncredited) as Sammy Boscoe * Jessica Szohr as Marielena Gutierrez * Bruno Amato as Sal * B. J. Novak as Male interviewer * Rob Riggle as Randy * Joanna García as Megan[4] * Will Ferrell (uncredited) as Kevin * Sergey Brin (cameo) as himself
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Reception[edit]
The Internship received mixed reviews from critics. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a rating of 34%, based on 157 reviews, with an average rating of 4.8/10. The site's consensus reads, "The Internship weighs down Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson's comic charisma with a formulaic script and padded running time that leans far too heavily on its stars' easygoing interplay."[5] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 42 out of 100, based on 36 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[6]
A majority of the reviewers have derided it for being a feature-length Google commercial. In his review, Ty Burr of The Boston Globe commented: "Here’s why Google is so successful: It's figured out a way for Twentieth Century Fox to make a two-hour Google commercial disguised as a summer comedy".[7] Stephen Rea of The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote on his review, "The Internship itself would be kind of charming, too, if this Google-recruitment film, this 119-minute commercial for Googliness, weren't so downright creepy".[8] The Guardian‍ ' s David Cox described the movie as a "two-hour corporate video,"[9] while British film critic Mark Kermode called the film "the longest advert I've seen in the cinema". He dismissed it as "one of the most witless, humourless, vomit-inducing horribly self-satisfied, smug, unfunny comedies I have ever seen".[10]
Another critique was that combining Vaughn and Wilson with Google was poorly timed, and that the film would have been much more successful, had it been released on the heels of Vaughn and Wilson's success in 2005's Wedding Crashers. This fact of timing was satirized by a video news story run by The Onion, a satirical newspaper, titled "The Internship Poised to be Biggest Comedy of 2005".[11]
Many former Google interns and Google employees noted the accuracy of the company environment depicted in the movie, but also pointed out that the internship process is nothing like that shown in the movie.