I just saw THE INTERN yesterday, and it really wasn't half bad. But the whole time I was watching Robert De Niro playing the sweet, kind intern, drying Anne Hathaway's tears and so on, I kept thinking about a movie he made many years ago called THE FAN.
THE FAN was this great old-fashioned De Niro movie, the kind our hero used to make when he was really menacing and dangerous. He plays this insane knife salesman who meets this young black baseball player who's a superstar but is having personal problems. And then De Niro decides he has to save this young superstar, but when it doesn't work out he goes berserk!
The thing that struck me was that THE INTERN and THE FAN share an identical plot. And that while THE FAN tries to be dark and scary it's more often fall-down laughing funny, like when De Niro's character keeps bragging that he knows Mick Jagger and that they used to "party till dawn" together. Whereas THE INTERN is meant to be funny but is never fall down laughing funny, except maybe in one scene where De Niro leads a crew of young guys to break into Anne Hathaway's mother's house. (Really, it's much funnier than it sounds. I swear I laughed out loud at some point!)
If only kind old Ben had flipped out at some point . . . like say, when he finds out his adorable boss' no good husband is cheating. I swear at that point I was waiting for De Niro to become his "true" self again, and make the snotty young husband pay and pay and pay. He really should have gone all insane knife salesman on the guy. Or like in CAPE FEAR, he could have started bombarding the wayward husband with Bible verses and mumbling cryptic warnings like, "you're gonna learn about loss."
Now that's comedy!
THE FAN was this great old-fashioned De Niro movie, the kind our hero used to make when he was really menacing and dangerous. He plays this insane knife salesman who meets this young black baseball player who's a superstar but is having personal problems. And then De Niro decides he has to save this young superstar, but when it doesn't work out he goes berserk!
The thing that struck me was that THE INTERN and THE FAN share an identical plot. And that while THE FAN tries to be dark and scary it's more often fall-down laughing funny, like when De Niro's character keeps bragging that he knows Mick Jagger and that they used to "party till dawn" together. Whereas THE INTERN is meant to be funny but is never fall down laughing funny, except maybe in one scene where De Niro leads a crew of young guys to break into Anne Hathaway's mother's house. (Really, it's much funnier than it sounds. I swear I laughed out loud at some point!)
If only kind old Ben had flipped out at some point . . . like say, when he finds out his adorable boss' no good husband is cheating. I swear at that point I was waiting for De Niro to become his "true" self again, and make the snotty young husband pay and pay and pay. He really should have gone all insane knife salesman on the guy. Or like in CAPE FEAR, he could have started bombarding the wayward husband with Bible verses and mumbling cryptic warnings like, "you're gonna learn about loss."
Now that's comedy!