Recencies van critici

Whether the film is good or bad is irrelevant, as its work was done long before it (eventually) hit cinemas. And it would essentially have to be a Renoir-level masterpiece to live up to the story of its own making, and without sounding disingenuous, it ain't that. Maybe a good comparison would be Joseph Mankiewicz's Cleopatra or Otto Preminger's Rosebud, films that are far more interesting to talk about than to actually watch.

Some of the jokes don't work, there's a sloppiness to some of it... But, in general, it's a bold audacious ridiculous movie, stupid as well as smart. In this context, stupid is not an insult. It's a compliment. The movie is a comedy involving two semi-losers infiltrating the most reclusive country on earth with a cockamamie plan to poison the sitting dictator. Of course it's stupid. I enjoy that kind of stupidity.

Rogen is far better at directing other performers—or at least performers who are not close friends—than he is at directing himself... The Interview's depiction of a pressure-cooker cult of personality really _is_ daring, in ways that go beyond the guest-dictator appearance of Saddam Hussein in The Big Lebowski or even the uproarious treachery of Kim Jong-il in Team America: World Police. Whether or not the real Kim tried to sabotage the movie, Park's fictional Kim steals it.

The stakes are higher around this movie than in the movie itself. Until its gotcha moment, The Interview, a single-minded action-comedy crossing swords with satirical farce, is bad entertainment.

Opportunities at rich satire flatten out into "Hangover" dude-dope-doodoo jokes, where the premise is that there's nothing funnier than watching over-privileged grown men act out middle school id worldwide, except for the spectacle of foreigners catching the Ugly American bug, too.

The movie in question is hardly a modern Dr. Strangelove or a take-no-prisoners sendup in the vein of South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. Still, standard-bearers for the First Amendment often come in unlikely forms. Sometimes—and certainly in the case of this scattered, ceaselessly ass-obsessed comedy—freedom means standing up for satirists' right to make fun of a head of state's bowel functions.

Despite their sharp observation of celebrity culture, however, Rogen and Goldberg fall victim to one of Lala-land's oldest canards, that Hollywood Movie Magic is not just a product but an unstoppable force for liberal progress worldwide. That naïveté gives the dictator the last laugh: whatever its effect on his dignity, the movie constitutes no threat to Kim's authority.

For all the hoopla that's been made over the Sony hack and Kim's demands that the film be pulled from release, The Interview is all talk, a sheep in wolf's clothing, which makes its frivolous politics all the more odious.

Oppressive, fascistic dictatorships have proved fertile ground for comic filmmakers from Chaplin and Lubitsch to Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino (whose "Inglourious Basterds" is another obvious reference point here). But "The Interview" is scarcely as funny or absurd as the average news item about North Korea itself, with two main characters who are so aggressively annoying that you secretly hope the assassination plot will turn against them.