The Interview

The Interview (15)

USA 2014  112 mins  Dir: Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg  Starring: James Franco, Seth Rogen, Randall Park, Lizzy Caplan, Diana Bang

Charlie Chaplin was arguably the first screen comedian to recognise how much sport there is to be had in making fun of brutal dictators. The Interview is no The Great Dictator. It’s not even Team America: World Police. But it was never intended to be. Until Pyongyang registered its disapproval by (allegedly) hacking Sony Pictures, this was just a slightly-better-than-average, hit-and-miss Seth Rogen comedy whose modest ambition was to deliver low frat-boy laughs by means of humour so anally fixated as to recall Basil Fawlty’s memorably snooty remark to an American guest: “Everything’s bottoms, isn’t it?” In the normal scheme of things, this would have enjoyed a couple of weeks in the multiplexes and slipped quietly to DVD. Now it’s being subjected to more analysis than its script can possibly bear.

Setting the tone, a cute little girl sings her heart out to an audience of North Korean dignitaries. The subtitles reveal that she is expressing a desire for “the United States to explode in a ball of fiery hell…may they drown in their own blood and faeces.” Meanwhile, over in the Land of the Free, dumbass celebrity talk show host Dave Skylark (Franco) and his marginally less stupid producer Aaron Rappaport (Rogen) are riding high in the ratings after such exposes as ‘Rob Lowe: Secretly Bald’, Matthew McConaughey’s goat-fucking shame and Eminem’s dramatic on-air exit from the closet (that’s a game Mr Mathers sending himself up in an uncredited cameo). It then emerges that Kim Jong-un (Park) is Dave’s biggest fan. He agrees to grant an exclusive interview to the incredulous duo in his luxurious palace. Dave is cock-a-hoop at bagging “the biggest interview since Frosty Nixon”, but then sourpuss CIA agent Lacey (Caplan – aka Virginia Johnson from Masters of Sex, in a rare fully-clothed performance) recruits the idiot duo to bump off the dictator during their visit.

The script rather glosses over Aaron’s pertinent objection (“If we kill him, won’t they get another chubby dude with a goofy hairdo to come in and replace him?”), but at least it displays some self-awareness in the gleeful way in which its pits all-American stupidity against the world’s most brutal and repressive regime. Rogen does his schlubby stoner routine again and removes his shirt rather more often than one might wish. Franco’s comedy performances can be quite unbearable to watch when he’s working from a mirthless script (Your Highness, anyone?), but his OTT mugging suits the character of Dave Skylark here. It takes a while for the real star to show up, but Randall Park’s Kim proves well worth the wait. He’s quite the fun-loving dude, with a fondness for babes, basketball, Katy Perry and, erm, blowing shit up in his old Soviet tank. Naturally, a full-on bromance develops between Dave and Kim. But is our dim-witted hero being played?

The conceit at the film’s core is that the North Korean cult of personality can be dismantled by humanising its Supreme Leader, demonstrating that he is not a god. But, hey, this isn’t sophisticated political satire but taste-free Bill and Ted/Harold and Kumar-style comedy bumbling, so it boils down to proving that Kim has a ‘butt-hole’. It’s neither big nor clever. But at least it doesn’t totally suck ass.