The Interview is really funny, which is too bad. Had it been terrible, the irony of its troubled release would be extra rich. Turns out though that it’s a film worth fighting for, a frantic crowd-slayer and tasteless R-rated fun. Its premise is inherently political, but directors Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg take their dick jokes more seriously. They could have easily invented a fictional dictator to be at the center of an assassination plot involving smarmy TV talk show host James Franco, but using a real name is simply more funny. This is already a film with a gag about camel toes, with slapstick scenes that turn gory and with a memorable moment in which Rogen hides a frighteningly large object up his ass. It’s a blizzard of rude humor. Turning polite with a fictional dictator would be the kind of wimp move that deflates the whole film. The story’s likely inspiration is Dennis Rodman’s lovefest with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. How did that happen? What does it mean? Is Kim Jong Un a cool guy when he’s not dictating? A good thirty-minute chunk of the film riffs on the question What would it be like to hang out with a dictator? Also, what if it was fun? Kim Jong Un is young for the leader of a country, barely into his 30s. For comic mileage, the film imagines him as a big kid, sheltered but personable and lonely at the top. Franco’s manic TV personality can relate and when the inevitable “bromance” erupts, it’s not between Franco and Rogen. It’s between Franco and Kim Jong Un (Randall Park).
So, we lost the potentially great irony of having the year’s most tumultuous film release turn out to be a stinker, but there is one glistening irony that remains: as the American film industry remains perennially fascinated by the era of Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunts, Hollywood was briefly (very briefly) silenced by communists.