The Interview

Seth Rogen and his creative partner Evan Goldberg don't always make the best movies. But you can always count on them -- for whatever it's worth -- to deliver when those movies are released on home video. Since the two of them tend to improvise the dialogue of their films, trying out variations on each joke throughout production, they're often left with massive chunks of unused footage. And they tend to include all of it on their Blu-rays and DVDs.

"The Interview," out now on Blu-ray after premiering via YouTube late last year, is no exception. Here's the roll call of extra features: A director's commentary (recorded prior to the major controversy, so don't expect any insights there), deleted and extended scenes (includes roughly 20 minutes of new footage, though some of it comes from pre-existing sequences), a gag reel, and a "Line-O-Rama" feature, where you can see the team improvise innumerable different options for a few specific lines. (Have you ever wanted to see 20 more versions of the "Stank Dick" joke Franco makes in this movie? You're in luck.)

Next up is a parade of featurettes: There's one on Rogen and Goldberg's newfound position as directors, one on Franco and Rogen's characters, one on the puppy that features in the film, one on the tiger that features in the film, one on improvising, one on the scenes they had to shoot in the nude, and finally one on Randall Park ("Veep"), who plays the North Korean dictator with a vampy relish that steals the film whole. (As if to confirm it, the final features are centered around his performance: We get Park's audition tape, as well as a "dating profile" he filmed in-character as the dictator.)

The now-infamous film, unfortunately and unsurprisingly, is not nearly as well-crafted as the disc it's hosted on. Rogen and Goldberg's first directorial effort, "This is the End," had a D.I.Y. energy (it was literally about them hanging out with their friends) that covered up all the hackish decisions they made behind the camera (a strobe-lit dance party scene set to "Gangnam Style," for instance). No such luck with "The Interview." The plot concerns Rogen and Franco wiping out Kim Jong-Un (it also steals its goofball-entertainers-embroiled-in-political-scheme narrative from "Ishtar"), so they're in the realm of action-comedy. And in that realm they reach their limitations very quickly.

There are numerous scenes in the movie wherein their visual compositions literally miss the joke. To wit: One sequence sees Rogen forced to rectally hide a spying device. Much humor is wrung from his attempts to insert it, but the camera is never in a position to capture the joke from a funny angle -- it just stays trained on Rogen and Franco's faces, as though this were any other conversation. They shouldn't need to struggle this much just to show Rogen's ass. These men tell funny jokes, but they haven't figured out how to get them on camera yet.

"The Interview"
Blu-ray
sonypictures.com
$19.99