Cinemavenger

   The funniest, nastiest movie reviews anywhere.

The Interview

To paraphrase Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects (paraphrasing the French poet Baudelaire - fancy), the greatest trick that Sony ever pulled was making the world believe it should pay even the tiniest bit of attention to The Interview.

Sure, the official story has been that, in an effort to keep Sony from releasing The Interview, a movie about a talk show host, Dave Skylark (James Franco), and his producer, Aaron Rapaport (Seth Rogen), assassinating North Korea's head honcho, Kim Jong Un (Randall Park), the real Un had his lackeys hack into Sony's systems and leak a bunch of emails in which rich, Hollywood assholes said mean things about other rich, Hollywood assholes.  (Oh, my stars and garters!)  Then the same hackers and other supporters of the Asian persuasion threatened to bomb any U.S. theatre with the red, white and blue balls to show the flick.

But, after having watched The Interview, here's what I think really happened.  Sony execs saw the final cut and thought:

"Oh, shit!  Our Christmas tentpole is a comedy that's about as funny as a positive AIDS test.  We're gonna lose our shirts when this garbage tanks!  Hey, wait a tick.  Kim Jong Un has a brain full of spiders and, you know, we do kill him off in this movie.  What if we made it look like he hacked our servers and was willing to literally kill people to force us to scuttle the release?"

Given what a mediocre piece of rancid kimchee The Interview actually is, the Sony conspiracy theory makes a fuck-ton more sense than the North Korean one.  Seriously, if it had been released as planned without all the alleged hacking and death threats, it would have been panned by critics, ignored by audiences and forgotten within a week or two . . . which would have been the best possible outcome for Un and North Korea . . . and the worst for Sony.

Or should I say, Keyser Sony-ze?

Because instead, The Interview, which shows Kim Jong Un shitting himself and getting immolated by American halfwits, will forever be remembered, and Sony will make more money off of it than they ever could have hoped for under normal circumstances.

As for the The Interview itself, James Franco is so unbelievably, irrationally, testicle-pummelingly awful that at one point I was tempted to think that maybe the movie could have been saved if they'd just cast someone else in his role.  Then I remembered that the initially promising plot fizzles out early, the writing sucks (How the fuck do you miss "ball game" in a list of all the places you could "take someone out" to?!), the usually reliable Rogen is way off and co-directors Rogen and Evan Goldberg seem like they couldn't direct traffic let alone a major motion picture.

If you see one parodic assassination of a North Korean leader movie anytime soon, make it Team America: World Police.

January 11, 2015