The Interview Review

The film survives in public memory as a news story, and the reviews written once people could actually watch it are notably cooler than the controversy suggests. The reliable element is Randall Park, who plays the dictator as a lonely, insecure man desperate to be liked, and the middle section where he and the host become genuine friends is the only place the satire finds a target worth hitting. Diana Bang is sharp in a role that keeps sharpening. Against that, James Franco's performance is pitched at a volume a great many critics found exhausting within ten minutes, and the comic strategy is mostly to repeat a joke until it becomes a different joke.

The plotting is slack, the second half surrenders to a conventional action climax, and the film keeps reaching for body humor whenever the political material dries up. There is a real idea here about celebrity access journalism and it is abandoned early. What most reviewers concluded is that a broad comedy became an international story on merit it did not have, and that the noise around it remains far more interesting than the film it protects.