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'Internship' offers part-time laughs

Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson reunite for "The Internship," playing furloughed salesmen trying to reinvent themselves at Google.

LAST TIME we saw Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson making mischief together was "Wedding Crashers" - being, as Vaughn put it then, "young and stupid."

Wilson's response: "We're not that young."

And that was eight years ago, before Wilson entered his Brian Wilson-ish "Drillbit Taylor" period, including "Marley and Me" and a gig as the voice of Marmaduke.

That would put visible miles on any man. Now the duo is back, turning their over-the-hill-gang status into a running joke in their reunion comedy "The Internship."

The two play downsized Willy Lomans - watch salesmen who lose their analog-era jobs and bluff their way into an internship at Google, where they compete for full-time jobs with younger, smarter and more with-it recruits.

Billy (Vaughn) and Nick (Wilson) are sore-thumb relics, and when the interns split up into teams, the two end up with the rest of the misfits - repressed Asian, eager nerd, anti-social hipster, and so forth.

The gags flow along predictable lines - in the tech arena, Billy and Nick are a drag on their hyper-educated, code-writing teammates. But their old-school, salesmen skill sets have a liberating effect on the socially awkward programmers - a trip to a strip club, for instance, solves all interpersonal problems.

Vaughn is game, as always. Wilson, by contrast, looks like he's having a harder time getting up for the Alanis Morissette sing-alongs, etc. He rises to the occasion, though, when asked to impersonate the world's worst boyfriend for love interest Rose Byrne.

In general, the movie is directed with impersonal anti-flair by Shawn Levy (he worked with Vaughn in "The Watch"), a dutiful Hollywood soldier whose priority appears to be safeguarding the obviously massive copromotional arrangement with Google.

And yet the movie is so consistently good-natured, it's hard to dislike. A few choice scenes and supporting contributions by Byrne, Will Ferrell, Josh Gad and Aasif Mandvi keep it watchable, even if it's not the powerhouse comedy we're looking for this summer.

Online: ph.ly/Movies