Movie review: Mission Kimpossible, or how ‘The Interview’ took on North Korea (and Hollywood) and won

The backstory

Once upon a time, the world’s top screen comedian directed and starred in a film that openly mocked a brutal dictator whose actions and policies had resulted in countless arrests, deaths and all-around suffering for those all who dared to oppose his regime. Generally lauded by those who’d seen it, the film was initially banned in numerous countries, including the United Kingdom. The comedian was Charlie Chaplin, the year was 1940, and the film was “The Great Dictator.”

While Chaplin will forever be remembered for his silent comedies, cineastes the world over will never forget that, in his first-ever talking picture, the distinctively-mustachioed star decided to take the piss out of Hitler and Mussolini and, in the process, created what many now consider to be one of his masterworks.

Seventy-five years later, we have Columbia Pictures’ “The Interview”, a comedy that openly mocks a brutal dictator whose actions and policies have resulted in countless arrests, deaths and all-around suffering for all who dare to oppose his regime.

Starring James Franco and Seth Rogen, “The Interview” has become the most talked-about release of 2014, gaining notoriety for its plot centering around the fictional assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. As early as June, the film made headlines when a North Korean Foreign Ministry official was quoted as saying that “The Interview” was a “blatant act of terrorism” which would be met with “merciless” retribution.

As debates on freedom of speech raged, the situation was exacerbated in late November when Columbia’s parent company, Sony Pictures Entertainment, fell victim to a cyber attack that saw thousands of confidential files and documents being released on the Internet. Despite a group calling themselves the “Guardians of Peace” taking public responsibility, it is widely speculated that North Korea was somehow involved, as the aforementioned hackers were quick to call for Sony’s cancelling “The Interview’s” release altogether.

Platitudes to their filmmakers’ freedom of expression notwithstanding, Sony announced on December 17 that it would not be releasing “The Interview” in any format – a mere five days after the film’s Hollywood premiere – citing concerns for public safety and a lack of support from major American theater chains. It would take no less than Barack Obama himself calling the cancellation “a mistake” for Sony to go back on its decision and release “The Interview” via as many independent theaters and online platforms as it could over the Christmas holiday.

The film

“The Interview” opens with an in-progress episode of “Skylark Tonight”, the sort of celebrity tabloid program that (sadly) increasingly passes for news these days. The program’s host is the incredibly vapid (and blissfully clueless) David Skylark (Franco), whose main concerns in life are the celebrity inanities he reports on and the drugs he consumes as soon as the cameras stop rolling. When “Skylark Tonight’s” long-suffering producer Aaron (Rogen), voices his wish to do "real" news, David sees it as the perfect opportunity to conduct the one-on-one broadcast of the century: a sit-down interview with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

Before the hapless duo can embark on their trip, they are approached by the CIA and given the unenviable assignment of assassinating Kim. Upon their arrival in Pyongyang, however, things go from bad to worse as the ever-impressionable David finds himself befriended by their target. As David and Kim Jong Un bond over their mutual love of margaritas and Katy Perry, Aaron tries anything and everything to salvage the mission while trying to ignore his obvious attraction to a North Korean propaganda officer.

To the screenwriters’ credit, however ostensibly ridiculous as “The Interview” makes Kim Jong Un (Randall Park) out to be, they give as good as they get, depicting our two heroes (and the sensationalist media culture they serve) in just as satirically scathing a manner.

As Skylark, Franco is perfectly cast as a drug-addled, self-absorbed star whose narcissism causes him to overlook what is staring him in the face. As the straight man to Franco, Seth Rogen plays yet another variation of his trademark put-upon nebbish, contrasting hilariously with David’s manic tendencies. While the character arcs the two leads go through are hardly original, David’s predictable transition from gullible patsy to crusading journalist is made just about tolerable by Franco’s (truly terrible) rendition of a Katy Perry staple in the film’s climactic moments.

Prior to actually viewing the film, one couldn’t help but wonder how anybody could take anything from the guys who made “Pineapple Express” and “This Is the End” as a serious political statement. Clearly, someone needed his head examined, because there was just no way the guys behind that stoner flick could have possibly come up with anything other than a delightfully offensive and idiotic comedy.
 
Here’s the thing, though: “The Interview” is gleefully, unabashedly, idiotic, and that’s the point. Is it juvenile? Definitely. Sophomoric? Indubitably. Irreverent? Absolutely. But that’s not to say the filmmakers aren’t trying to tell us something relevant here, because they are – they just chose to package it with a hefty serving of their trademark rapid-fire dick, drug and sodomy jokes. Just as “The Great Dictator” did 75 years ago, “The Interview” takes on a deathly serious topic in the most effective way possible: by making fun of it.

Now, this approach may not be for everyone, and it’s easy to see how some of the film’s more outrageous moments could be construed as offensive, but to dismiss it outright on those grounds is to ignore what the film is actually trying to get across. Much like the best episodes of “South Park”, the scatological gags and obscenity-laced one-liners belie a mainstream piece of entertainment that delivers thoughts and concepts that probably never would have been approved for mass consumption had they been presented as anything other than jokes in a screwball comedy.

Indeed, many of the film’s more outlandish assertions have a basis in fact, such as Kim’s fascination with basketball, his father’s assertion that embracing of Western culture would make Jong Un and his brothers feminine – even the bust Skylark is given is similar to something Dennis Rodman was presented with in real life. All things considered, it really does say a lot that the missile that finds its way up Rogen’s rectal cavity is far less offensive than the presence of fake grapefruit.

The aftermath

At this point, the film’s actual quality (or lack thereof) is irrelevant. By now, many will want to see the film if only out of sheer curiosity. To wit, in its first six days, “The Interview” achieved a decent  (for a limited-release title) gross of $2.851 million, with an additional $15 million generated by online sales over the same period. In less than a week, the film is already Sony’s best-selling online movie release of all time, as well as Google Play and YouTube Movies’ bestselling video-on-demand title of 2014, to say nothing of the film being downloaded 1.5 million times within 48 hours after first appearing on illegal torrent sites.
 
From a business perspective, it realistically stands to reason that “The Interview” will make far less than it would have prior to the cyber attack. However, due to the sheer amount of buzz generated over the past few months, the filmmakers and free speech pundits will be happy to know that it’s entirely possible that more people will see the film now than a conventional wide-release would have afforded.

Ironically, had Sony just gone about their business and released “The Interview” in October as scheduled, then sold it on home video three or four months later, that probably would have been the end of it. Now, regardless of whether or not Pyongyang actually had anything to do with the Sony hack, all North Korea actually succeeded in doing was giving the film the single best endorsement it could have possibly received.

And that just makes it even funnier. — BM, GMA News