The Interview [Review by Haus]

Here’s a shocker: The Interview — the movie that North Korea allegedly doesn’t want you to see — isn’t actually that good.

You’ve probably heard the premise: A lowbrow talk-show host (James Franco) and his producer (Seth Rogen) are tapped to interview, and assassinate, North Korea’s “Supreme Leader,” Kim Jong Un.

Setting aside the political backdrop and taking The Interview on its own terms, it’s funny but inconsistently so. Rogen and Franco were fabulous in This Is The End, but here Franco’s character is too one-dimensional and gives Rogen little to play to. Diana Bang is entertaining as a North Korean officer, but she’s shallow as a Nevada koi pond and her zealotry plays all wrong when she questions her allegiance. And Randall Park plays Kim Jong Un mercilessly, equal parts fawning fanboy, insecure girlyman, and schmaltzy manipulator. There are jokes to be mined here, and about a quarter of them hit home. Katy Perry is played. The well-hyped assassination scene is, if anything, anticlimactic. If you’re not expecting too much, it’s all a fun, zany, ultimately mindless ride. I laughed a fair bit, just not as much as I’d hoped. It’s also not exactly smart satire: Team America: World Police did it ten years ago and ten times better.

So if it weren’t for all the hoopla surrounding its aborted release today, The Interview would be pretty forgettable. But alas, the hoopla is real and The Interview, for better or worse, is the sudden poster child for a weird new free speech crusade in a weirder world of blackhat gunboat diplomacy.

I have no idea if North Korea had anything to do with the Sony Pictures email breach, but I will say this: If it did, and if it did so in order to squash this film, it’s honestly not too hard to see why. The Interview is no playful roasting: It’s a savage and sustained ad hominem takedown of Kim Jong Un himself. In fact it’s so vicious and racially charged that it’s a bit uncomfortable to watch at times, like giddy wartime propaganda or a blackface show. Rogen and Franco are those guys at the party who went a little too far, and I think they’re probably a bit sheepish about it in the cool morning grey.

The Interview will go down in history an important film — the first time threats from cybercriminals and a foreign power derailed a major release at your local cineplex. And that’s why, shortcomings notwithstanding, you should see it. Not just to gauge what all the fuss is about, but because — as you well know — we mustn’t acquiesce to a chest-thumping babyface dictator with a failed high-and-tight who takes umbrage at tier-two American goonery.

See the film in protest! Of what, you ask?

Who knows. Best I can figure, seeing this movie is an act of either staunch but nonspecific defiance, solidarity with Sony Pictures, anti-dictatorial jingoism, or some other thing, but in any event it’s zeitgeisty as hell and that’s probably good enough. Citizen Kane it’s not, but we only get so many banned things to bootleg and pass around these days. The Interview will just have to do.

Haus Verdict: See it or the terrorists win. No, really, that’s like actually a true statement.