The Interview is the sixth collaboration between Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who grew up together and first foisted their irreverent sense of comedic infantilism on the movie-going public with the raunchy-sweet teen comedy Superbad (2007). In most of their collaborations Rogen and Goldberg have shared writing credit while Rogen has played a supporting or lead role, although beginning with This Is the End (2013), they have also taken the directorial reigns, for better or for worse. The Interview is a Rogen-Goldberg comedy through and through, continuing without pause their obsession with sex jokes, gross-out gags, and creative profanity, all of which is typically in the service of male camaraderie (they are, if anything, buddy-movie auteurs). Of course, they’ve always been politically incorrect—that is, in fact, their raison d’être—but in The Interview they take their political indelicacy to new heights as they aim their comedic guns at a real-life target: The Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea and its brutal despot Kim Jong-un.

Rogen plays Aaron Rapaport, a one-time serious journalist who has become the producer of an inane celebrity interview show hosted by his vapid best buddy Dave Skylark (James Franco). When Dave learns that Kim Jong-un is a huge fan of his show, he gets the preposterous idea of trying to land an interview with the reclusive dictator, which he believes will earn him credibility (it’s his Frost/Nixon moment). Aaron, who plays reason to Dave’s impetuosity, is skeptical, but wouldn’t you know they actually manage to secure the interview, which draws the attention of the CIA in the form of Agent Lacey (Lizzy Caplan), who approaches them about using this rare opportunity of physical proximity to assassinate Kim with a poisoned handshake.

However, once they arrive in North Korea, they find that things are not exactly as they were expecting. Yes, there are armed guards everywhere, the architecture is all Soviet-era concrete dullness, and they are ordered around by a humorless political operative (Diana Bang) on whom Aaron has a burning crush. But, they also see things they weren’t expecting, like a fully stocked grocery store and a “fat kid,” which would seem to fly in the face of a starving populace under an iron thumb.

And then there’s Kim (Randall Park), who immediately bonds with Dave over margaritas, Katy Perry songs, one-on-one basketball, and blowing up trees with artillery shells from a Soviet tank. It turns out—at least, it appears to turn out—that Kim is actually a misunderstood good guy, a sensitive dude with daddy issues who can party like it’s 1999 but still shed a tear when confronted with the pressures of lineage. Dave is sold and wants to cancel the mission, but Aaron is convinced that it’s all a show. Who’s right? Well, the fact that Kim’s fiery death scene became an Internet meme long before anyone actually saw the film would seem to suggest that it’s all a put-on, although knowing that hardly saps the film of its humor. Watching Franco and Rogen bounce off each other (this is the third pairing after 2008’s Pineapple Express and This Is the End) has its own comedic charm, as Rogen plays the exasperated foil to Franco’s wide-eyed, happily grinning airhead. Franco, in particular, is given lots of room to cut loose, and he plays faux serious and genuine foolishness with the same gusto. But, when the movie really works, it is because the bromance chemistry between them feels genuine. As with Rogen and Goldberg’s other films, everything is a joke except true male friendship and loyalty, which is either a touching sentiment or further evidence of their caveman ethos.

And, like many of their previous films, the jokes are largely hit or miss, although I found myself laughing much more than not. A lengthy early sequence in which Dave interviews Eminem, who unexpectedly comes out of the closet, is too obvious and goes on for too long. Similarly, the film’s sudden use of bloody graphic violence in the final third (including a character having not one, but two fingers bitten off) feels both out of place and a bit desperate, as if Rogen and Goldberg were afraid that the daring of the film’s central conceit would start wearing thin past the 90-minute mark so they had to ramp up the shock value.

But, even when The Interview doesn’t entirely work, you still have to admire Rogen and Goldberg’s chutzpah in making a film of such brash political outrageousness, although one imagines they had no idea it would set off the international furor that it did. When so many comedies are complacently mining the same tired territory, Rogen and Goldberg’s decision to move into genuinely dangerous terrain gives The Interview an inherent edge. Comedy has often raised a middle finger to the powerful and the humorless, and in King Jong-un, Rogen and Goldberg may have very well found their ultimate target.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © Columbia Pictures