If you have a adolescent nephew, this is the perfect flick to share. It is full of dumb laughs and mostly harmless hijinks (unless you happen to be Kim Jong-un.) And it is funny. I laughed quite a bit, between cringes over silly bathroom humor. And as my teenage nephew noted at the end, “It was better than The Hobbit.” (Yep, we saw that too, and the consensus was that it was the weakest of the trilogy.) It does help that we watched The Interview at home on a nice big screen, not paying theater prices, and our expectations were pretty low to start with. But as dumb movies go, it doesn’t suck.
Basic story, in case you’ve missed it in the news. Tabloidish TV host Dave Skylark (James Franco) finds out that Kim Jong-un is a big fan of his show, so his producer Aaron Rapoport (Seth Rogan), hoping to burnish his serious journalist rep, finagles an interview with the secretive dictator, a huge scoop! But before they head to Pyongyang, the CIA enlists them in a plot to assassinate the North Korean leader. Being a comedy, things do not go as planned. Skylark and Kim bond, and Rapoport gets cosy with their sexy Korean handler Sook (Diana Bang.) The CIA plot gets sidelined, but the actual interview succeeds where the murder plot failed. Franco and Rogan are their funny selves, and the script has some super silly moments. Randall Park is great as Kim, all charm and delusion, and ultimately insane. It is not going to go down as one of the great comedies, but for $5.99 online, it is a decent cheap entertainment.