So, we nearly had some terrifying flood of terrorist attacks sweeping the globe because of this? Ok, so more than a few experts think the cyber-attack on Sony that lead to them pulling this film from American cinemas may not have come from North Korea after all, but everyone’s a winner anyway. It did huge business online, the bad guys got to scare Sony, and now we here in Australia get to see this film the way it was meant to be seen: in a near-empty cinema because everyone else has already downloaded it. And that’s probably the best way to see this film, because this latest pairing of Seth Rogen and James Franco brings pretty much nothing new to the table: Franco is Dave Skylark, a popular yet lightweight talkshow host, Rogen is Aaron Rapoport his long-term producer who’s started to dream of being taken seriously, and Kim Jong-un (Randall Park) is the Supreme Leader of North Korea – and a big Skylark fan.
Rapoport manages to score an interview on the basis of that fandom, the CIA (in the form of Lizzy Caplan) ask them to assassinate Kim while they’re there, wacky hijinks ensue. Only the hijinks aren’t all that wacky: there are definitely laughs to be had here, but the whole thing feels like a handful of decent jokes stretched out with a whole lot of riffing – mostly from Franco, who goes all out as a manic airhead who almost certainly couldn’t exist in real life – to create something movie length. Park is the best thing about this film, mostly because he manages to create an actual plausible character: it’s not exactly a good sign for Rogen and Franco when you wish there was less of them in their own movie.