Out of touch? Think Flashdance was the pinnacle of inspirational stories, or that you don’t need to keep up with technology to hold on to your job? The Wedding Crashers’ Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn reprise their paring in this more wholesome outing that pays homage to mega-giant Google.

Billy and Nick have partnered each other as salesmen for years, but when the company they work for collapses, they are ready to try any spiel to score a chance for another job. They head for the Mountain View Google campus at San Francisco Bay and find themselves outliers banded into a group which must compete with others for a proper position.

Mr Chetty (Aasif Mandvi) runs the intern program and you know you are in good hands watching him on screen – something about the twinkle in his eyes or the smile twitching at the corners of his mouth is a comfort. Of course, he says the buddies are a disappointment. Can they redeem themselves?

Requisite nerdy types represent every known geek cliché in the old blokes’ gang but they are a peculiar enough lot under the young eye of team leader Lyle. He is self-admittedly “wyziwyg – what you see is what you get” – and refers to himself in the third person until made to promise to “stick to first and second”.

Naturally, the disparate characters with low social skills could do with some shaping by the mature salesmen, though this appears to occur primarily through the bonding exercise of getting drunk at a pole-dancing bar.

The youngsters know their C++ stuff, understand all the challenges that require proper maths, and where they need to search for bugs, not passwords. They can “sift the code”, leaving the oldies to sort them out only through brute-force sport or in the face-to-face communications pitch, where maturity and experience might finally count for something.

The story (by Vince Vaughn) is by-the-numbers and inoffensive, and although Aussie actress Rose Byrne creates a love interest, it’s not really about the romance. That’s all right; this funny-enough flick will appeal most to those who might be interested in what it would be like to work in such an environment, although only some of the film was shot on-site (and the rest in Atlanta’s Georgia Institute of Technology).

The Internship upgrades product placement to a new level. Googlers, get Googlier with your Googley-ness – and if you don’t get it, you don’t deserve to be there.

The Internship is showing in cinemas now.