The Interview is a comedy about terrorism, assassination, and a North Korean dictator who looks like a cartoon villain. It stars James Franco as Dave Skylark, a pop star whose late-night talk show interviews the world’s most powerful men. Seth Rogen plays his producer, Aaron Rapoport, and together they get picked for a secret CIA assignment: travel to Pyongyang and kill Kim Jong-un.
The setup is simple. The execution is not. The movie spends its runtime doing exactly what it promises: jokes about celebrity, politics, and the absurdity of American media. It also spends a lot of time killing people, blowing things up, and making jokes about death. The result is a film that is funny, crude, and ultimately hollow.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
The Premise
The plot is thin. Dave Skylark and Aaron Rapoport are invited to interview Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea. They accept, unaware that the CIA has turned them into assassins. The plan is to kill the dictator during the broadcast, ending his reign of terror and bringing peace to the Korean peninsula.
The problem is that the premise is not new. Comedies about assassinating dictators have existed since at least the 1980s. The Interview adds nothing fresh to the formula. It just takes the idea and pushes it further, making the violence more graphic and the humor more juvenile.
The movie does not care about subtlety. It cares about shock value. The jokes about death are not clever. They are just jokes about death. The audience laughs not because the writing is sharp, but because the images are gross.
Franco and Rogen
James Franco plays Dave Skylark as a narcissistic pop star who thinks he is a genius. He is vain, shallow, and completely self-absorbed. Seth Rogen plays Aaron Rapoport as the straight man, the producer who tries to keep Dave grounded. Together, they form a mismatched duo that audiences have seen a hundred times.
The performances are adequate. Franco is good at playing ridiculous characters, and he commits fully to the role. Rogen is more restrained, but he has to be, since his character is the voice of reason. Neither actor gets much depth to work with. The script treats them as stereotypes, and they deliver as such.
The supporting cast includes Randall Park as Kim Jong-un, a performance that is genuinely good. Park plays the dictator as a spoiled, petulant child, not a cold-blooded killer. This is a smart choice, because it makes him more human than the other characters. It also makes the jokes land harder, because you feel sorry for him even as you laugh at him.
The Jokes
The humor in The Interview is mostly physical and verbal. There are jokes about celebrities, jokes about politics, and jokes about sex. There are also jokes about death, and those are the ones that stick out. The movie is full of gags involving guns, knives, and explosions. Some of them are funny. Most of them are not.
The best jokes are the ones that target the hypocrisy of American culture. The movie satirizes the way we treat celebrities as gods and politicians as villains. It shows how the media can manipulate public opinion with a smile and a soundbite. These moments are sharp, and they land. They are also rare.
The rest of the comedy is lazy. The movie relies on repetition and shock to get laughs. It is not subtle, and it is not sophisticated. It is just loud. The jokes about death are particularly crass. They involve blood, guts, and severed heads. The audience laughs, but the laughter feels uncomfortable.
The Violence
The Interview is violent. It is very violent. The movie is rated R for strong bloody violence, profanity, sexual content, and drug material. That rating is accurate. The film is filled with scenes of people being killed in graphic detail. Heads explode, bodies are blown apart, and blood splatters everywhere.
The violence is not presented as realistic. It is presented as a joke. The characters are not really dead. They are just props for the punchline. This creates a strange tension. You are supposed to laugh, but you cannot help feeling uneasy. The movie asks you to enjoy the destruction, even as it makes you wince.
The violence is also used as a plot device. The characters use violence to solve problems, and the movie rewards them for it. This sends a troubling message. It suggests that violence is acceptable, even heroic, as long as it is funny. The movie never questions this assumption. It just follows it.
The Politics
The Interview is set in North Korea, a country that most Americans know little about. The movie presents it as a dystopia, a place where people live in fear and obey a tyrant. This is not inaccurate. North Korea is a totalitarian state, and its citizens suffer under its rule. The movie does not hide that.
What the movie does hide is nuance. It portrays North Koreans as either mindless followers or brainwashed zombies. The only sympathetic character is Kim Jong-un, and even he is a cartoon. The movie never shows the complexity of life in North Korea. It never shows the people who resist, the families who love, or the artists who dream. It just shows a caricature.
The politics are also simplistic. The movie assumes that killing Kim Jong-un will solve everything. It ignores the fact that North Korea has survived for decades without him. It ignores the fact that the regime is built on fear, not on one man. The movie reduces a complex situation to a single target. That is a mistake.
The Legacy
The Interview was released in November 2014. It was directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the same team behind Superbad and This Is the End. The film was made for Sony Pictures, and it was distributed worldwide. It was a modest success, earning over $138 million at the box office. That number is impressive, considering the controversy.
The movie faced a major setback before release. In October 2014, Sony Pictures was hacked by a group calling itself Guardians of Peace. The hackers stole thousands of emails and files, and they threatened to release them. They also demanded that the movie be pulled from theaters. The company complied, and the movie was shelved.
Then something unexpected happened. The movie was leaked online. People downloaded it and watched it at home. The response was positive. The movie became a cultural phenomenon, and it was eventually released in theaters anyway. This is the irony of The Interview: it was a failure that became a success because of a hack.
The Verdict
The Interview is not a good movie. It is a flawed movie with some good moments. The jokes are uneven, the violence is excessive, and the politics are shallow. It is not worth seeing in theaters, and it is not worth buying on DVD. It is worth remembering as a footnote in cinema history, a film that was shaped by forces beyond its creators.
The movie is not a masterpiece. It is not even a good film. It is a product of its moment, a reaction to the culture wars of the early 2010s. It is a reminder that humor can be cheap, and that violence can be trivialized. It is a warning about the power of the internet and the danger of hacking.
The Interview is a film that should be studied, not celebrated. It is a cautionary tale about the limits of satire. It is a reminder that the line between comedy and cruelty is thinner than we think.
Key Facts Box
– Title: The Interview
– Release Date: November 2014
– Director: Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg
– Starring: James Franco, Seth Rogen, Randall Park
– Box Office: Over $138 million
– Rating: 5.2/10
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