THE INTERNSHIP (Rated PG-13)

It’s hard to believe that until now the comedy team of Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn, fantastic cut-ups in “Wedding Crashers,” has not reunited since 2005. Fittingly, I had to look that up on Google. Or maybe it was Bing.

According to “The Internship,” Google, depicted as a Disneyland-style workplace for geeks and nerds, may be the happiest employment place. After all, the Silicon Valley headquarters comes complete with a beach volleyball court, an indoor slide and free food in the cafeteria.

The movie’s high concept is to take two borderline middle-aged Luddites and stick them smack into the middle of the high-tech corporate culture of Google, where smug young techies toil away at the latest app.

Billy (Vince Vaughn) and Nick (Owen Wilson) are salesmen of high-end wristwatches, but their crusty boss (John Goodman) informs them that they are “dinosaurs” for trying to sell watches in the age of smartphones.

Suddenly out of work and with no prospects, Billy and Nick flounder on their separate ways. Nick flails at efforts to sell mattresses for his sister’s obnoxious boyfriend (Will Farrell in a cameo role).

One of them hits upon the idea of enrolling in an online university so they can become college students qualified to enter the summer internship competition program at the Google campus.

This inspired thought is fraught with peril since neither Billy nor Nick has any real knowledge of computers, particularly how to write code or design applications. I feel their pain.

They commandeer a public computer away from school kids at the public library to do an online interview with the Google staff. Speaking loudly and mugging for the camera, they come across ridiculously funny.

It appears that a “diversity” program at Google includes the enlistment of clueless white guys who spend much of their time making 1980’s pop cultural references, often to “Flashdance.”

Once they arrive at the Google headquarters, Billy and Nick discover that they need to join a team of fellow interns in order to enter competitions that will determine the recipients of full-time positions.

Billy and Nick, though affable characters, prove to be about as popular with the interns half their age as lecherous old men at a beach party hosted by hot college girls.

Fortunately for them, a few of the interns are such social outcasts that even fellow geeks and nerds have avoided them. Reluctantly, Billy and Nick are accepted by default into a small group.

The de facto leader, if you will, is Lyle (Josh Brener) who desperately tries to fit in by uttering ill-fitting slang words. Then there’s Stuart (Dylan O’Brien), the sullen loner openly contemptuous of the old guys.

The token Asian is Yo-Yo (Tobit Raphael), a guy so rattled by his domineering mother that he plucks his eyebrows as a form of punishment for his self-diagnosed failures.

The only female in the group is Neha (Tiya Sircar), a bright, intelligent beauty who overcomes her social awkwardness and sexual insecurity with helpful platonic advice from Nick.

As a team, these disparate characters have about as much chance of winning a competition as a one-legged man in a potato sack race. Initially, the college kids all feel that Billy and Nick are holding them back.

Things start to turn around after a Quidditch match goes badly in the first half. With Billy and Nick inspiring the group with a pop culture pep talk, they nearly score an upset victory.

We’ve seen this before in films like “Revenge of the Nerds.” Here, the outcast kids are taunted by the snotty British jerk Graham (Max Minghella), who claims to be both physically and mental superior to his classmates.

Billy and Nick are subjected to pranks as well, such as being tricked into looking for Professor Xavier and finding a wheelchair-bound lookalike at Stanford who takes great offense to their insensitivity to his resemblance to a fictional “X-Men” character.

While Billy and Nick bumble through most of the tech assignments, their worldly experience and charming ability to sell things prove to be a saving grace. This should come as no surprise.

The two middle-aged guys have some creative ways to loosen up their socially discomfited and gawky teammates, including a side trip to a San Francisco disco/strip club in Chinatown.

The humor, though, is mostly at the expense of Billy and Nick. Billy insists on developing a program for “on the line” instead of online. Nick clumsily works a charm offensive on a pretty mid-level manager (Rose Byrne).

“The Internship” doesn’t capture the manic lunacy of “Wedding Crashers,” but it makes good use of the affable charms of Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson.

The film may seem like an unnecessary, even perhaps unwarranted love letter to Google, but there are things about this tech world culture that seem oddly amusing.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.