It's hard, at this point, to separate The Interview from all the fuss around it - the controversy, the hacks and the accompanying threats, the pulled release and the eventual decision to give it something smaller. It's made it so it's hard to watch the film without discussing whether or not it's worth dying for. (Spoiler: of course it's not. Look, I love The Big Lebowski, but even that movie isn't worth dying for. Probably.) But the bigger question should be whether or not The Interview succeeds as a comedy, and the answer to that is an unqualified "yes". That shouldn't be that surprising, really; between Superbad and This is The End, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg have shown a knack for writing adventurous, ambitious comedies that marry honest and heartfelt emotion with crass and crude humor, comedic timing with effortless genre building, and intelligence with silliness and childishness. Here, the film may nominally be about a shallow TV personality and his unfulfilled producer getting recruited to kill Kim Jong-Un, but it's also about people who want to be taken seriously and thought of as more than what they've been pigeonholed into being. Yes, it's s hilariously funny comedy that mocks Kim Jong-Un by turning him into something much more human, but it's also a sharp look at America's foreign policy. And sure, it's a broad bro comedy, but it's also a surprisingly effective (and gory) action movie - indeed, one of the film's many pleasures is the fact that Rogen wants the film to look like a movie and makes an effort visually instead of just coasting through the jokes lazily and not caring how it all looks. The Interview isn't as tight as This is The End or Superbad; the themes are a little less seamlessly interwoven, the genre blending not quite as nicely done, the weirdness not as thrilling. But it's still really, really funny, anchored by a trio of great performances (Franco gets less annoying as you become used to his character; Rogen is his usual charismatic, great self; but the real standout is Randall Park as Un, who turns the character into something far more engaging and interesting than it might have been in lesser hands) and written so well that it becomes less a parade of offenses or a smirking look at Korea and more a genuinely winning, hilarious, fun film.
- Josh Mauthe
- Josh Mauthe
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