To the dismay of North Korea, Sony’s The Interview was illegally downloaded 750,000 times on Christmas. And why wouldn’t it be? Seth Rogen and his writing/directing partner, Evan Goldberg, have established themselves as one of the best comedy pairs in the business, and have gained millions of loyal fans. The longtime friends wrote the screenplays for Superbad, This Is the End and Pineapple Express. They had a couple misfires with The Green Hornet and The Watch, but that’ll happen. My big question though, is to figure out where The Interview should rank in terms of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg films.
Unlike This Is the End, Superbad and Pineapple Express, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg didn’t write the screenplay for The Interview. Instead they received directing and story credits, while Dan Sterling wrote the screenplay. Maybe I am missing how ironic and brilliant The Interview is, but personally I thought it was very mediocre. While I was watching The Interview, I started to notice that the majority of the lines for Seth Rogen and James Franco seemed to be improvised, rather than structured jokes. I felt like I was watching an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm", instead of a Seth Rogen movie. For "Curb Your Enthusiasm", Larry David provides a general goal for a scene and a concept that needs to be touched on, rather then specific lines. And I think that’s exactly how Dan Sterling approached writing The Interview. He is a relatively small name in the comedy world, so it’s not unreasonable to think that Sterling would provide an outline and ultimately let Seth Rogen and James Franco do their thing. The dialog in the movie between James Franco and Seth Rogen presented very few memorable jokes for Rogen. I believe this was due to his consistent efforts to try and set up Franco for a good improvised reaction and line.
An interesting way to look at The Interview is to compare the writing by Dan Sterling as opposed to Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg in This Is the End. This Is the End, like any well-formed screenplay, leaves subtle hints at the underlying plot. For example, while in the convenient store Jay Baruchel and Seth Rogen encounter a father and daughter very kindly asking to use to bathroom. A very rude, and dismissive cashier, responds to them by saying they cannot use the bathroom, and ultimately the cashier is left behind while the blue light transports the father and daughter up to heaven. That writing style works, not too obvious, but a very clever hint as to what is going on in the plot.
There is no question that the Kim Jong-un character played by Randall Park was the highlight of the movie. Singing Katy Perry will undoubtedly burst anyone into laughter. But the jokes by Rogen and Franco didn’t seem to land nearly as hard, and at times felt like very “cheap laughs”. When I say cheap, I am referring to scenes like when Seth Rogen’s character has to put the drone up his butt, and when he gets his fingers bit off. Sure that’s funny, but its much more simple and less clever then a typical Seth Rogen joke. My favorite line by Rogen in the movie is when he is talking to his college friend about the type of journalism both of them are involved in. After getting teased for working on an E News style show, Seth Rogen makes fun of his friend by saying that he must have really built up Sixty Minutes while joking that it's only been on the air for eighty years. This was a very well thought out joke, and I think lands substantially more than any quick improvised line he did in other scenes.
A big critique I had of this movie was the lack of celebrity cameos. There were two legitimate celebrity cameos that were in the movie: Eminem and Rob Lowe. Both were very funny when they appeared on Skylark Tonight, but where was Jonah Hill, Judd Apatow or anyone else? I think people would have loved it if Dan Sterling had wrote a brief flashback scene for Aaron Rapaport (Seth Rogen) to reflect on numerous highlighted celebrity news stories rather then just two that had been broken on Skylark Tonight.
Overall I thought this movie was an average comedy that leans closer towards a flop (Green Hornet), rather then a cult classic (Superbad). But no one will be able to take away from its historical significance. For the first time in cinema history the thought of war over a movie wasn’t that far-fetched. This movie will certainly be historic, just not for the right reasons.
