“The Interview” Was Stupid

MOVIE WASN’T WORTH THE FUSS …

|| By FITSNEWS ||  So we finally got around to watching The Interview, the Sony Pictures’ “action comedy” starring James Franco and Seth Rogen.  This, of course, is the movie purportedly responsible for a rash of cyber attacks/ terrorist threats emanating from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (a.k.a. DPRK, or “North Korea”).

Except it wasn’t …

Sadly, we fell for the narrative … believing North Korea really was (is) crazy enough to elevate global tensions over an otherwise forgettable buddy film that happened to focus on a government plot to murder dictator Kim Jong-un.  But that’s not what happened.  The North Koreans were upset, to be sure … but they didn’t hack Sony.  Nor did they level any threats against America (at least not any new, credible ones).

The whole thing was an exercise in tail-chasing … not unlike The Interview itself.

Don’t get us wrong: The premise and plot underpinning this movie had limitless potential – and its cinematographers succeeded in making the audience feel as though they had been whisked away to the most secretive, unstable regime in the world.

The crass jokes were all hitting their marks, the transitions were on point, and the exquisitely uniformed North Koreans filled their bad guy boots every bit as deftly as the Nazis in an Indiana Jones movie.  Oh, and we absolutely loved Lizzy Caplan, the Mean Girls alum who portrayed a dead sexy Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative responsible for orchestrating the fictitious assassination plot.

But just when the movie appeared to be on the verge of achieving something truly rare – an artful, accurate, thought-provoking global political comedy neatly wrapped in side-splitting slapstick – something went painfully wrong.

At the very moment The Interview had us thoroughly invested in its depiction of Kim-Jong-un as a thirty something playboy with daddy issues – a closet lover of Katy Perry’s “Firework” and margaritas (which he was led to believe were “gay”) – it lost us.

We don’t know how to say it other than the movie just unraveled …

In its attempted depiction of the hypothetical overthrow of the world’s only socialist monarchy – which should have been The Interview‘s rousing crescendo – the movie instead descended into a chaotic, disjointed progression of gratuitous gore and random silliness.

Simply put, it got really stupid … really fast.  And in so doing, it squandered otherwise excellent performances by Franco, Rogen and Caplan (and of course Randall Park, who excelled in the role of Kim).

Back in the real world, we continue to support North Korea’s right to govern itself as it chooses – and to pursue nuclear weapons if it so chooses.  Of course we also believe the United States (like any other nation) has the right to preemptively attack this “rogue” nation’s military in the event its leaders make a credible threat against our homeland.

Of course given its own lack of credibility … our government had better bring real evidence of such a threat.

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