Is 'The Interview' Actually Any Good?

By Genevieve Burgess | Miscellaneous | December 20, 2014 |

By Genevieve Burgess | Miscellaneous | December 20, 2014 |

There’s been a lot of discussions this week with regards to why Sony Pictures decided to cancel the release of The Interview, whether they should have, what factors besides the hacking went into that decision, and who was ultimately responsible for it. As it stands right now, Sony is hedging and saying they aren’t pulling the movie FOREVER, just due to theater concerns over possible attacks and North Korea is denying involvement and offering us some vaguely threatening assistance in locating the hackers. But the thing we haven’t really discussed, or just discussed in an off-hand way, is The Interview itself, since it’s hard to judge a film you haven’t seen.

But there are people who have seen it. The film was screened for some critics before the decision was made to stop and/or delay the release. Rotten Tomatoes has it at a 52% based on 29 reviews. Uproxx has a round up of some published reviews that seem to indicate that The Interview is exactly what most of us thought it would be, a slightly stupid comedy with an inflammatory premise. All the controversy over the film does seem to have an effect on the audience perception, given that a lot more people are very aware of the movie, and 96% of them (on Rotten Tomatoes) want to see it. Honestly, I would not be half as interested in this movie if not for them trying to keep me from seeing it. Without the hacking/threats I probably would have stumbled across it on cable a year or so from now and been like “Huh. Well, that’s a little tasteless.” and gone about my life. Now that there’s a question of whether or not I’ll ever get to see it I’m suddenly very invested in having access to a film I wasn’t interested in to begin with. Good work, whoever is trying to make it disappear!