Interview, The (2014)

Synopsis: TV host, Dave Skylark (James Franco) and his producer Aaron Rapoport (Seth Rogen) are the team behind Skylark Tonight, a popular tabloid show. When they learn that North Korea's Kim Jong Un (Randall Park) is a huge fan of the show, they manage to set up an exclusive interview with him, in the hope that it will legitimise their journalistic credentials. But the CIA gets wind of their plan to fly to Pyongyang for the one-on-one meeting and convinces them to use the opportunity to assassinate the dictator.

When the so-called Guardians of Peace hacked into the database of Sony Pictures Entertainment in November last year in an effort to prevent the release of this movie, they also managed to hand the producers a world-wide marketing campaign. Sadly, the intrigue, cyber-threat and global politics surrounding that act were, arguably, more compelling than the film itself.

The Interview starts off well enough with a marvellous opening scene that combines the sweet innocence of a singing child with the malevolence of an ICBM to establish (in case we’d somehow missed it in the media) the pervasive threat of North Korea to world peace or, more specifically, the security of the United States. Cut to Franco as the effusive Dave Skylark on a high-rating, low-brow celebrity gossip show that, equally, establishes the superficiality of this aspect of American culture through a couple of very funny interviews probing Eminen’s sexual orientation and Rob Lowe’s hairline. But then, the film quickly descends to a tedious level of undergraduate and scatological humour that all feels tiresome and, at times, uncomfortable coming from the mouths of Franco and Rogen who are starting to look a bit too old for these kinds of jokes.

On the plus side, Park is very watchable as the unbalanced young dictator with an incongruous taste for Western culture and Diana Bang delivers the strongest performance as Sook, the North Korean commanding officer and love interest for Rapoport.  Rogen delivers pretty much the same performance as we get in most of his films (which will please some and annoy others) but Franco’s over-acting is the real disappointment. It’s a shame because, in the hands of a good director (such as Danny Boyle with 127 Hours) Franco is capable of great things, but here it seems the lid hasn’t been kept on enough.

The three creators of the film are longstanding friends and collaborators. Rogen and Franco go all the way back to that wonderful and underrated 1999 TV series Freaks and Geeks. Rogen and Goldberg, who met in high school, have worked as screenwriters on more successful outings such as 2007’s Superbad and 2008’s Pineapple Express. Here, though, they step up to the roles of co-directors and perhaps it’s the absence of the rigour of an outside eye who isn’t a buddy that has allowed them to be so self-indulgent in so many scenes.

The Interview feels like a missed opportunity to take a great idea and produce something sharper and more politically savvy that could have had something to say about contemporary politics and the clashes of culture. Instead, it feels more like a life-support system for a string of not-very-good jokes.

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