The Intern (2015) ….this is how far De Niro has fallen…

Star – Robert De Niro & Anna Hathaway

Genre – Romantic Comedy

Run Time – 2 hr 2 minutes

Certificate – PG13

Country – USA

Awards –   1 Wins & 7 Nominations

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I think it’s fair to say Robert De Niro’s career hasn’t exactly been moving forward of late. The moment he put his gun down and started fiddling around in rom-coms that was pretty much it. Now he is old he is reduced to doing career parody and those career ending avuncular roles where he can’t kiss young beautiful women on screen anymore and merely a wise old owl, the case here. It does not suit him. It’s kind of sad, a great actor reduced to working with Anne Hathaway.

The director is Nancy Myers (The Parent Trap, What Women Want and Its Complicated..) ,who does a lot of his romantic movie stuff and this one not exactly a stretch for a female director who does not like to be stretched, this time tackling themes of female emancipation at workplace and life in general, and in the most sugary way, Oscar nominated Anne Hathaway (for Rachael Getting Married) his co-star…sorry leading lady.

After all this metoo# stuff I think it’s rather ironic that women are secretly crying out for the alpha male experience more than ever these days as increasingly feminized men are on best behavior not to offend. It just aint sexy. Films like this that want to explore the emancipation of the female species don’t really solve the argument though over how sexy a house husband can be or do women make better bosses than men? They just make it worse and piss off the feminist some more.

===Cast===

• Robert De Niro as Ben Whittaker
• Anne Hathaway as Jules Ostin
• Rene Russo as Fiona
• Anders Holm as Matt
• Andrew Rannells as Cameron
• Adam DeVine as Jason
• Zack Pearlman as Davis
• Jason Orley as Lewis
• Christina Scherer as Becky
• JoJo Kushner as Paige
• Nat Wolff as Justin
• Linda Lavin as Patty
• Celia Weston as Doris
• Mary Kay Place as Jules’ mother (voice only)
• Steve Vinovich as Miles
• Molly Bernard as Samantha

===Plot===

Seventy-year-old widower Ben Whittaker (De Niro), a retired executive from a phone book company, is rather bored. He has done all the retiree things like golf, travel, clubs and stuff and had dropped into his daily routine of coffee shops, walks, museums and tai chi in the local park. He decides to apply to a senior citizen intern program, a very American thing. The company in Brooklyn he applies to is ‘About the Fit’, a fast-growing e-commerce fashion startup, whose effervescent founder and CEO Jules Ostin (Anne Hathaway) had previously agreed to a community outreach program where seniors would intern at the firm but has already forgotten about it. Ben impresses everyone with his life experience and is one of four hired from the oldies.

Ben is assigned to work with Jules, who is somewhat skeptical at first as she if not a delegator and has little for him to do, Ben quickly frozen out by her. But he slowly wins her and her co-workers around with his geniality and gets into Jules’s good graces. He organizes a messy desk of fashion samples and gives dating advice to all the youngsters. But one day he notices Jules’s chauffeur drinking from a brown paper bag and takes the opportunity to take the chauffeurs hat for the day and drive her around to get to know her.

Jules is married to a house husband Matt (Anders Holm) who cares for their super cute daughter Paige (JoJo Kushner). He gave up his career to help hers when the company took off.

Ben also has a new romantic interest, the in-house massage therapist named Fiona (Rene Russo), who takes a shine to the new gentleman in the office. But can Ben get to know his boss well enough to give her enough advice to keep him around as she contemplates selling her company that has got too big for her.

===Results===

Someone actually liked this tiresome and sickly sweet comedy as its $44m budget did $198 million back. I was not one of them. We can only thank our lucky stars there is no Intern 2. It is not great and pretty pointless. It doesn’t tackle sexist issues it sets out to tackle but reinforces them. Jules (Hathaway) creates a booming business, but a group of older men in suits thinks she needs an older man in a suit to run her company. So, who shows up to provide her with the guidance and backbone she needs? An older man in a suit? It’s reasonably well written but just grating after a while as the two stars text their lead performances in with big cheesy smiles as the excitable support cast show off to impress their leads.

Hathaway is super petty but just off-putting the way Julia Roberts is around comedy. She won a deserved Oscar for Les Mis but should stick to musicals. De Niro just looks defeated on screen now and really should go back to the mob movies. The washed up action hero worked really well for Liam Neeson and would revive De Niro. Some minor awards ceremonies nominated De Niro for this film in the hope he would pitch up and Quentin Tarantino named this movie one of his favorite movies of 2015, presumably to make him pitch up in his next movie. Like I said, it’s sad to see the greats rot on screen.

===RATINGS===

Imdb.com – 7.1 /10.0 (177,345votes)

Rottentomatos.com – 60% critic’s approval

Metacritic.com – 51% critic’s approval

===Trailer===

===Critics===

The Guardian –‘I sometimes have a bit of a sweet tooth for Nancy Meyers’s Ephron-lite diversions, but this, frankly … eww#

Daily Telegraph –‘Sharply misjudging how much hand-on-shoulder dad advice is too much, the whole film’s so genial it could smile, and smile, and smother you while it smiles.’

New York Times –‘The Intern degenerates into a series of monologues about ambition and relationships and having it all. As the speeches pile up, our goodwill dissipates, and so does the film’s magic..

New Yorker –‘This earnest, effusive haut-bourgeois fantasy, by the writer and director Nancy Meyers, runs roughshod over rational scepticism with the force of her life experience’.

TIMES UK –‘The Intern is a lavish workplace comedy that asks the question: What would it be like if we caught up with Andy from The Devil Wears Prada a decade later? … The answer is, to be frank, agony.’

The Mirror –‘Unfortunately, [The Intern] contains too many discordant pieces, resulting in a story that is largely tone-deaf to the message it is trying to share’.