The Interview review: dumb and dumber along the DMZ

We're an entire 47 minutes into The Interview before someone says: "We don't have a better plan: you're going to have to stick it in your ass." But never fear: there are clumsy jokes about gay porn before we get that far.

It is perfectly possible to make a side-splittingly funny film about North Korean dictatorship. And that film is Team America: World Police.

Still, we must pay some attention to The Interview, the project that allegedly pre-empted last year's Sony hack, a leak now widely believed to have been the work of a disgruntled ex-employee with administrative access privileges, rather than a rogue nation.

At any rate, North Korea had little to fear from this toothless comedy, which sees James Franco’s airhead celebrity interrogator and Seth Rogen’s Seth Rogenish producer head to Pyongyang for an unlikely TV interview with North Korean premier Kim Jong-un (Randall Park).

It soon transpires that Kim is a bro, who likes Mai Tai cocktails, singing along to Katy Perry's Firework, and, of course, "pussy". Once thoroughly seduced, Kim turns out to be less of a bro and North Korea – shockingly – is not the abundant paradise the Americans have been led to believe.

A subplot in which the CIA attempt to recruit the chaps as assassins – "Kim must die: it's the American way" – is grafted on with a dull thud. A final helicopter versus tank sequence makes one think of such Hollywood everything-but-the-kitchen-sink flops as 1941 and Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood.

At heart, this is the same old Seth Rogen bromance: Seth hearts James. But James hearts Kim. So Seth seeks solace in a suspiciously manly North Korean lady soldier. Until Seth hearts James again. Come now; you weren’t expecting political nuance, were you?

Between daft bromances, James Franco is a clever chap who adapts William Faulkner novels for the big screen and who gets Marina Abramovich. He’s better than this. So are you.