Film review: 'Internship' predictable, but Vaughn, Wilson deliver laughs

From the very first moments of “The Internship,” the buddy comedy starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, it’s obvious exactly where it’s going. Two washed-up salesmen on the wrong side of 40 vie with a bunch of mouthy millennials for a job at Google.

If you can’t guess that the geezers will teach the youngsters something about real life while the kids school them about Google Chrome, well, you’ve never seen a movie before.

But as the saying goes, it’s the getting there that’s half the fun. “The Internship” doesn’t break any new comedic ground, and it will evaporate from memory upon leaving the darkened theater. But it’s an amiable, occasionally laugh-out-loud, fish-out-of-water tale that gently mocks our modern technological age while simultaneously embracing it (and giving a big sloppy kiss to Google).

’The Internship’

DIRECTED BY: Shawn Levy

STARRING: Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, Rose Byrne, Max Minghella, B.J. Novak and Aasif Mandvi

RATED: PG-13 GRADE: C

RUNNING TIME: 119 minutes

Best buds Billy (Vaughn) and Nick (Wilson) find themselves out on the street when the watch company they work for goes belly up. After fooling around on the Internet, Billy finagles a way to get them into a Google internship program. A lucky few will be offered a full-time job at the end of it.

But there are two problems: Neither Billy nor Nick knows anything about technology, and they’re twice the age of all of the other interns.

Their very presence and incompetence enrages a snotty British intern (Max Minghella). A boo-hiss villain if there ever was one (he does everything but twirl a moustache), he takes it upon himself to kick them out of the running.

Meanwhile, Billy and Nick team up with other intern outcasts — who may know a lot about computers but little about social interaction — to try to outwit their competitors and the no-nonsense manager who oversees the program, Mr. Chetty (Aasif Mandvi). “The Internship” is “The Bad News Bears” with smartphones.

As directed by Shawn Levy (“Night at the Museum”) and written by Vaughn and Jared Stern, “The Internship” offers a broad canvas for its two stars, last together in “The Wedding Crashers” in 2005.

They riff off of each other with abandon. One of the movie’s early highlights is their hilarious videoconference interview with a couple of earnest Google geeks (one of whom is played by B.J. Novak from “The Office”).

Once on the corporate campus, Nick flirts with an exec (Rose Byrne) who, at first, is cool to his boorish charms. While the romantic element feels a bit tacked on and isn’t as funny as the main narrative, it’s nevertheless a showcase for the shaggy-haired Wilson persona.

The movie also plays up all of the clichés of the Google workplace — free food, sleep pods and co-workers who all look like they’re in indie bands.

Yet it’s never critical of Google, nor does it even mention controversies over privacy. (Be sure to stay for the end credits and a clever take-off on Google-isms.)

But no one goes to a Vince Vaughn/Owen Wilson comedy for a lecture. They go to see a couple of guys who are on their comedic game, and that’s just what the two deliver here.