Saturday, November 07, 2015

Movie review - "The Interview" (2015) **1/2 (warning: spoilers)

One of the most politically significant films in recent times - how many movies spark an attack from an overseas country, in this case a cyber attack from North Korea? It's actually got a lot of funny moments in it as well as actually giving two decent roles to Asian-American comedians - Randall Park is hilarious as Kim Jong-Un and Diana Bang even funner as a North Korean officer.

The beginning is a bit iffy - too much time was given over to James Franco riffing and crapping on - there wasn't that much fresh about his character: a hyper actively slightly idiotic TV host. Seth Rogen is fair more likeable but even then scenes where we set up his character's dissatisfaction seemed odd - everyone does celebrity journalism now and 60 Minutes would leap at the sort of stories he and Franco are doing on their show.

Also it felt mean that they went over there to assassinate Kim Jong. This might sound dim but that's not a very nice thing to do - not when there's no personal reason for doing it for either character. If one of them had a relative or lover who had been kidnapped/killed by North Koreans it would have made more sense or at least meant more. We know North Korea is a threat to world security but it's not that much of a threat.

Lizzy Kaplan was wasted - ditto that snobby reporter friend of Rogen's. I kept expecting both to turn up in the third act. And it cheats by recreating history.

Having said that there's lots of funny jokes and the movie got better as it went along. I loved how Frano and Park bonded over Katy Perry. It's also a really good looking, stylishly shot movie.

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