The Good: If you like Vince Vaughn’s shtick (I certainly do,) this movie has plenty of Vince Vaughn performing his schick. Is it good enough to warrant seeing this movie? I’m not sure. If you like Owen Wilson’s shtick, this movie has some of that too.

Also, I was happy to see Dylan O’Brien in another movie. I remember my wife and I having a nice chat with his grandmother in a near-empty screening of his last movie – a very underrated Jon Kasdan film called The First Time – which we all agreed did not get the distribution or the critical recognition it deserved. Here Dylan’s landed a good supporting role in a major summer blockbuster, and again gives a solid, River Phoenix-inspired performance. Good for him!

That’s about it for the good.

The Bad: The film’s story is contrived and strained in the extreme, and frequently made me cringe. Its humor often feels forced and unoriginal, although it was occasionally good for a (muted) laugh. Its theme of washed-up, middle-aged people daring to dream didn’t really work – the film did not feel realistic, nor was it a successful parody – it inhabits a strange netherworld between the two. I left the theater very underwhelmed by it all.

The Ugly: This movie feels like a two-hour advertisement for Google. The staff of Google is clearly portrayed as smarter than and morally superior to everyone else on the planet, and their corporate mission of “connecting people to information” and “making people’s lives easier” is rammed down the viewer’s throat, as are the free food and the nap pods (both of which I personally find a little creepy.) If this is the price we all had to pay for having this film shot on Google’s campus, they should have just faked it.

Google is a corporation pursuing bottom-line profit. They’ve done some cool things, and they’ve done some very uncool things. They’ve demonstrated ingenuity and resourcefulness in dominating the problem of searching the internet. They’ve shown no ingenuity or resourcefulness in resisting or overcoming the centralization of this function, which naturally creates a comprehensive data summary about every person, and which in turn renders people completely vulnerable to whoever pays for, or demands, access to that data. They’ve shown no interest in privacy-by-design technologies for the highly personal information entrusted to them by people, even though it is well within their technical power to do so. Instead, they do exactly the opposite: they’re in the spy business to make billions, and their beautifully organized and linked data would make the Stasi drool, as would Facebook’s. People are not worried about this kind of thing, but they should be.

And just to further question this lilly-white image of Google, don’t forget Google (like Facebook) enthusiastically participated in the U.S. government’s coordinated (and shameful) attack on WikiLeaks. Or how Google (again, like Facebook) freely cooperates with the NSA to hand over everyone’s personal data for data dredging – they say they only do it “when legally required to do so,” but they know full well that by our government’s secret interpretation of article 215 of the Patriot Act, that is any time the government wants, for any reason whatsoever. Google could use their incredible power to fight this in some way, or at least bring it to the public’s attention, but they don’t – they just say “yes sir,” and hand the shit over. Why? Well, they’re all about connecting people to information, after all.

We Americans are already way too in love with corporations and unaccountable tyrannies, and have become way too sarcastic and dismissive of democracy and individual rights. This film’s message, which is basically “good people get to have a great life, because they get into good corporations which fill the world with love” is just about the most disgusting and unhelpful message these filmmakers could possibly be sending out as artists.

I’m rather sorry I saw this film.