The censorship row over Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s satire The Interview – whose US release was briefly halted by North Korean activist-hackers outraged by its mockery of Kim Jong-un – feels redolent of a more polite age, a Marquess of Queensberry age. In the light of the Charlie Hebdo murders, it seems trivial. The movie is now out in the US and Europe, and it would be nice in a #JeSuisTheInterview spirit to stick up for it – to hail it as something in the tradition of Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be Or Not to Be, or indeed Sacha Baron Cohen’s xenophobia comedies. But after a promisingly crass start, the film runs out of ideas and after some T&A material and violent slapstick, winds up in a mood of plumply sentimental solemnity.
James Franco plays Dave Skylark, who hosts a dumbed-down TV interview show: Seth Rogen plays his long-suffering producer Aaron. The news comes through that they have a huge fan in the form of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, played by Randall Park – the pushy politico Danny Chung from Armando Iannucci’s Veep. Kim, a big spoilt baby, invites our two goofy heroes over to Pyongyang for an interview, and the CIA tell them they must take this opportunity to assassinate him.
There are some nice gags at first about these terrified chumps, their celeb world, their unsuitability for this task and indeed post-teen life in general. But the experience of actually being out in North Korea, even Comedy North Korea, has a sobering effect; the film is becalmed by a reluctance or inability to think up anything all that funny. The Interview will soon go to DVD; the extras probably won’t include anything about those embarrassing Hollywood emails that the hackers released.
