Screw You, North Korea! I Saw The Interview.

When last we checked in with The Interview, Sony Pictures had pulled the film from theaters and been roundly criticized for it. Since then, though, the company reversed course and put the movie out in select theaters around the country and made it available online. I guess the advance word that the studio couldn’t pivot quickly to an online release was just so much crap. Last night, I ponied up six bucks and watched the film over the internet.

As you’ve undoubtedly heard by now, the plot concerns a U.S. entertainment journalist named Dave Skylark (James Franco) and his producer Aaron Rapaport (Seth Rogen), who comes from a serious news background and is frustrated by all the fluffy stories that Dave has had him do. When they hear that Kim Jong-un (Randall Park) is a big fan of Dave’s, they ask the North Korean dictator for an interview and are shocked to get it. The CIA then enlists Dave and Aaron to assassinate Kim while they have access to him.

The best part of the movie is right at the beginning, and it has nothing to do with North Korea. It’s when Eminem (playing himself in an uncredited cameo) is on Dave’s show and casually mentions that he’s gay. The homophobia in Em’s rap music is actually all about his own homosexuality, it seems. The good stuff starts happening at about the 1:15 mark of this clip.

http://youtu.be/50mx8g0H5eE

“I’m sorry momma, / I never meant to hurt you. / I never meant to make you cry / But tonight, I’m comin’ out the closet.”

I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist. After that sequence, unfortunately, it’s all pretty much downhill for The Interview. Three generations of the Kims’ godlike rule has made the real-life North Korea into a deeply weird place. Rogen and Evan Goldberg (who share writing and directing duties here) don’t engage with the absurdity, and even though they don’t exactly have a track record in political satire, it feels like a huge missed opportunity. They imagine Kim as a creepy overgrown legacy kid. Park does some interesting things with the role, playing the dictator as a starstruck fanboy in Dave’s presence. Still, when the filmmakers try to make fun of Kim by revealing him to be a closeted Katy Perry fan, you know they’ve gone off on the wrong track.

The satire is aimed more at the American media, personified by the idiotic Dave, who pulls out of the assassination plot and is ready to proclaim himself Kim’s buddy after hanging out with the dictator, shooting hoops, doing drugs, and having sex with hookers. There’s a good point to be made about how journalists can be co-opted by access to the powerful people they’re supposed to be holding accountable. Unfortunately, Rogen and Goldberg aren’t the filmmakers to make this point. In order for the comedy to work here, the North Korean government’s abuses would have to be going on right in front of Dave without him seeing them.

Much of the comedy just hangs on the friction between Dave and the put-upon, mission-oriented Aaron. This means too much depends on the onscreen chemistry between Rogen and Franco, which has worn thin. In their other movies together like Pineapple Express and This Is the End, they had other actors around them contributing to the laughs. That’s not really the case here. (Lizzy Caplan is terribly wasted as the guys’ CIA handler.) To make things worse, Franco totally overacts in an off-putting way.

Well, worse movies have been made into martyrs for the cause of free speech. The whole fuss over The Interview has taught us that Hollywood studios need to get their cybersecurity in order, and that while foreign regimes can now censor across borders, the rest of us don’t need to stand by and take it. Still, the biggest laugh might just be that North Korea’s internet is now experiencing outages that are totally not America’s fault and totally unrelated to what happened to this movie.