BEFORE: Everybody was buzzing about this film late last year, since the real Kim Jong-Un was threatening to blow up theaters that screened it. Silly Korean dictator, we don't need you to come here and threaten theater audiences, we've got enough Americans doing that already. Another foreigner trying to come here and take American jobs...
So I felt I had to get it from PPV when it became available, since I didn't know if any cable channel would dare to eventually run it. Seth Rogen carries over from "The Guilt Trip", he'll be around for a couple more days.
THE PLOT: TV host Dave Skylark and producer Aaron Rapoport land an interview with a surprise fan, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and are recruited by the CIA to turn their trip into an assassination mission.
AFTER: My wife watches that "Team America" movie about once a year, which featured a puppet version of Kim Jong-Il, and had some good moments. It's sad for "The Interview" that they did more funny things with a marionette North Korean leader than this film does with real actors. It's also sad that people rallied behind this film as a patriotic cause, declaring no foreign dictator had the right to curb Hollywood's releases - I'm guessing none of those people took the time to WATCH the film before they made statements supporting it.
You'd like to think that actors and directors would get better over time, let's say people who've made a few comedies should, all other things being equal, learn from their experiences and you might expect their later comedies to be funnier than their earlier ones. Not so in this case - this film has jokes that go on too long, other jokes that don't land, and some that just go nowhere at all.
There's a tiny bit of insight into how an American celebrity could be wooed into a bromance with a foreign dictator (you're not off the hook yet, Dennis Rodman), but that's about as clever as this film gets. Before long it devolves into poop jokes, dick jokes and anal sex jokes. Whatever promise it had of being clever just got tossed away. It probably wouldn't have done much business at the box office at all, if Kim Jong-Un hadn't started complaining about it. He could have watched the film die a quick death if he had only kept his mouth shut.
There are several plot holes you could drive a tank through, but the worst NITPICK POINT to me is: If the U.S. government could deliver these guys the exact supplies they needed via a drone drop, then they could have just as easy taken out Kim Jong-Un with a drone strike. There was no need to send human assassins, and they could have spared us all a lot of bad comedy.
Also starring James Franco (last seen in "This Is the End"), Lizzy Caplan (last seen in "Mean Girls"), Randall Park (last seen in "Larry Crowne"), Diana Bang, Timothy Simons, Reese Alexander, Anders Holm, with cameos from Eminem (last seen in "8 Mile"), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (last seen in "Lincoln"), Rob Lowe (last seen in "Mulholland Falls"), Ben Schwartz, Bill Maher (last seen in "Delivery Man"), Seth Meyers (last seen in "New Year's Eve"), Brian Williams.
RATING: 3 out of 10 margaritas
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