As the producers of a film that relied on gags such as Eminem coming out on tabloid television and Kim Jong Un enjoying Katy Perry’s work, the controversy caused by major cinema chains’ refusal of The Interview was the best thing that could have happened for Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg.
Thanks to the extensive discussion of free speech this decision sparked, the film managed to pull in $31 million in digital and video-on-demand sales. Combined with the $5 million from select independent cinemas who elected to show the film, The Interview has come close to recovering its $44 million investment. It’s extremely doubtful that this relative success would have come about without the Internet’s outcry, as the satirical film seems closer in content to Dumb and Dumber than the extremely important representation of free speech it was made out to be by Redditors everwhere.
The abundance of racist accent imitations in the script is hardly surprising, but the film does rely on other more unexpected running jokes, which all grow stale after the first delivery. Franco’s character makes several stilted Lord of the Rings references, and is set up as the bumbling comic of the pair. Franco and Rogan also portray an odd, forced bromance, all while commenting almost constantly on the sexual appeal of the two only female characters with speaking roles.
Worse than all of these tired attempts at comedy, however, is the total lack of relevant satirical content. Satire is meant to poke fun at oppressors and highlight problems and wrongdoings in our society. Rogan’s character only offhandedly mentions North Korea’s very real prison camps once, and the film ends with North Korea becoming a democratic state.
The citizens the protagonists claim to be liberating are shown sitting in family homes when they watch the interview for which the film is named, not starving in camps, while Kim Jong Un is very simplistically portrayed as a playboy with father issues. The real, relevant problems that Rogan and Goldberg are supposedly calling out with comedy are instead made fun of in multiple goofy ways.
Either the satirical content was intended and lost in sub par acting and writing, or it’s not really meant as satire, and the goal was to make a boring, racist film. Regardless, it didn’t deserve the hype.