The Interview – So wrong, yet so right

‘The Interview’ was never destined to be a mainstream success.  This happens to some films because they’re released before their time, have the wrong star, or try and be too clever for their own good.  However, in the minority of these cases, the reason the film doesn’t succeed is because of pressure from an entire country that doesn’t like the way it’s being portrayed on screen.  At the time of release, the company that made ‘The Interview’ was under cyber hacking attack by North Korea, forcing them to seriously rethink whether or not to release this film in the cinema.  In fact… will I get in trouble from people on the other side of the world just for writing that I enjoyed it?!

It’s about a mainstream TV chat-show host (James Franco) who finds out that his US low-brow entertainment show is – believe it or not – actually quite liked by the leader of communist state North Korea.  He’s then offered the once-in-a-lifetime chance to fly to North Korea and do what no journalist has done before, interview its ‘glorious’ leader, Kim Jong-un.  This, he readily accepts because he thinks that once he’s interviewed President Kim it will cement his name in journalistic history.  However, when the CIA hear of this, they decide that it would be far more beneficial for the rest of the world if James Franco (and his producer, played by Seth Rogen) simply assassinate the ‘madman’ instead.

Now, if you’re not too familiar with the Franco/Rogen combo then you might not know that they’ve starred in numerous films together and are generally pretty good buds in real life.  Therefore, once again, they allow their natural chemistry to carry out the dialogue of this movie.  However, said ‘dialogue’ is pretty ‘adult’ in nature, so expect much of their interactions to be s3x-based or peppered with drug references.  The two of them may be good (if you’re generally into their particular brand of humour), but I thought that it was Randall Park who stole every scene he was in.  For he had the unenviable task of portraying the Leader himself and, in my opinion, did a great job (I’m not saying that Kim Jong-un would act like this in real life, but, for the purposes of a comedy film, I think it’s fair to say that this was a good way of showing the man who – currently – could be the biggest threat to the West on the planet).

As I said, the humour is adult and quite ‘bawdy’ at times, but if you can forgive that (and are generally a fan of the two leads and their recent collaborations) then you should enjoy this.  They even put in a couple of quite fun action set-pieces in the final act and, although the CGI is a little ropey here and there, I think for a comedy that isn’t really an ‘action blockbuster’ you can forgive this.  I definitely think that ‘The Interview’ could well be the funniest film that uses North Korea as the bad-guys (oh, apart from ‘Team America’ – in which case ‘The Interview’ is the funniest ‘live action’ film about North Korea – and it has a cute puppy.  What more could you want?).

8/10 The Force is definitely strong with this one