BEFORE: My trivia team won tonight - even though we were in 5th place after three rounds, we had a near-perfect audio round, and a perfect lightning round - way to finish strong, guys! The team sent me up to compete on the buzzers in the final round, and I won by knowing that an aardwolf is a type of hyena. How did I know this? Not a clue. I must have run across this fact somewhere in all those crosswords I do. Anyway, my team split $200, and I was out late, so a short movie for Tuesday am (after midnight) is in order. Sticking with the grocery store-worker theme.
THE PLOT: Two assistant managers of a corporate grocery store vie for a coveted promotion.
AFTER: This turned out to be another slice-of-life movie, the humor comes from situations that stick pretty close to real-life, like hearing your neighbor practicing the banjo, or being upset that your spouse earns more than you. Or competing with someone at your workplace for an opening as a manager.
It's a simple concept - two men, one job. But sometimes in the simplest situations we can see the greatest truths. In the end we're all rats in a maze going after the same bit of cheese, and what matters is the path we take to get there. No matter what your job is, you need to be able to go home at night to your loved ones, knowing that you put in some hard work that day, and that you did so honorably. Isn't that what it's all about, really?
Like George Carlin once said, companies are looking for people who show up, punch in, pitch in, put out, clean up, punch out, head home, throw up, turn in, sack out and shut up...
The film's delicate balance came from not making the situation black and white - neither guy is a saint, and neither is a giant prick, either. That might have made the film too simple, I think. Of course both men want the job, each one feels that they deserve it, and each one contemplates how far he is willing to go to get it. But by not going to extremes with the situations, the movie also plays it a little safe. Compared to, say, a Jim Carrey film, which would be way over the top.
I'm feeling generous tonight - though, really, after paying $7 entry fee and $15 for food and beer, my share of the $200 prize meant that I broke even for the night - but you can't put a price on hanging with your friends and coming in first place, can you? And now we get to be defending champions in the high-stakes competition in 2 weeks - so that's a big win. Anyway, I'm awarding this movie an extra point for featuring the awesome song "Time For Me to Fly" by REO Speedwagon.
Starring Seann William Scott (last seen in "Mr. Woodcock"), John C. Reilly (last seen in "Step Brothers"), Jenna Fischer (last seen in "Walk Hard"), Fred Armisen (last seen in "The Rocker"), Gil Bellows, Lili Taylor (last seen in "Public Enemies") and Bobby Cannavale (for the third time this week!), with cameos from Jason Bateman (last seen in "Extract"), Fred Gonzalez (last seen in "The Rookie"), and Masi Oka (last seen in "Get Smart").
RATING: 5 out of 10 shopping carts
And then there are those movies that have nothing particularly wrong with them except the fact that they simply don't work. This one was well acted, well shot, and it's fairly entertaining. But there's nothing here.
ReplyDeleteI think the problem is that the writers bamboozled themselves into thinking that we'd learn about Seann William Scott and John C. Reilly by how they react to the job opportunity and how they compete with each other. Apparently not; these characters don't seem to change throughout the movie and we know as little about them at the end as we did at the beginning.
"Risky Business" is the perfect counterexample. Instead of "he wants to be named manager of a new supermarket," think "he needs to raise enough money to fix his dad's Porsche before his parents get home from vacation." That's not the real story; it's just the ticking clock. The real story is about how Young Mr. Cruise navigates his first foray in the real world and its grownup problems.
By the end, he's changed from a fairly dull and uptight kid who thinks that life is an orderly sequence of informed choices and predictable results, to a young man who appreciates that security is an illusion and "sometimes, you just gotta say 'what the ****?'."
There's no such character development in "The Promotion." And it's not as though enough happens along the way to distract us.
The one question that could have saved this movie before they locked down the screenplay: "Is this anything?"
(No. This isn't anything.)