Writer/director Steve Conrad talks a good game. Both before and after the Sundance debut of his new comedy The Promotion, he talked at length about the importance of originality, and had a lot of great ideas about big, important, smart things he thought he was saying with his movie. Unfortunately none of that really comes through in the film that’s up on screen, and The Promotion is a big rehash of a lot of other comedic ideas which have been done dozens of times before.
Set in a grocery store, it tells the story of two men competing against each other to earn a big promotion. Their competition gets heated, and results in a series of restrained dirty tricks and accidental slights against each other. It borrows comedic elements from sources as lame as Employee of the Month and as inspired as NBC’s The Office. Some of them work, some of them don’t, but the movie earns laughs even when it doesn’t deserve them because, even though a lot of his big ideas don’t shine through, Steve Conrad knows what he’s doing when it comes to comedic timing.
It doesn’t hurt to have a brilliant cast too, and in this case it’s the always genius John C. Reilly facing off against the perennially stiff Sean William Scott. In this case Scott’s stiffness is an asset, which plays off well against Reilly’s soft, cuddly, loser exterior. It’s also interesting that Conrad never gives his movie a villain. That’s one spot where he does buck the formula he’s borrowing from here. Usually this movie has a clear bad guy to root against and be defeated by our hero. In The Promotion, that villain never materializes. Both of the leads competing against each other turn out to be surprisingly likable, and even more surprising it doesn’t do anything to take away from the film’s comedy.
Jenna Fischer, Gil Bellows, and Fred Armison round out the rest of the primary cast. Fischer is good in anything, especially when, as she is in this, she’s scantily clad. Bellows has this weird, uncanny ability to get laughs with simply a blank stare, and Armison is great in small doses, which is exactly how Conrad has the good sense to use him here.
The Promotion isn’t very original, and I can’t help but wish that Conrad had actually managed to make the smart movie about America’s obsession to get ahead that he seems to have on his brain, but it is, more often than not, funny. In the age of Judd Apatow I don’t know if that’s enough to make anyone sit up and take notice of a little film like The Promotion, but it’s worth a look whenever it shows up in theaters.
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