Bad job

Workplace comedy The Promotion
is a waste of talent

by MARK SLUTSKY

I wondered why I hadn’t seen any advance hype for The Promotion. Being a workplace comedy with an enviable cast of stars—John C. Reilly, Fred Armisen, Jenna Fischer, Lili Taylor and Jason Bateman among them—it seemed weird that I’d never even heard of it. Well, now I’ve seen the thing, and mystery solved: it’s pretty bad, and I half-suspect the only reason it’s getting released here at all is that one of the main characters is supposed to be from Quebec.

Seann William Scott, best known as American Pie’s Stifler, plays Doug Stauber, assistant manager of a Chicago big box grocery store. With a miserable job keeping order in the store’s parking lot and a clueless boss (Armisen), Scott yearns to get the big promotion to manager of the store’s new location. All seems well until the arrival of a rival: a new transferee from Quebec, Richard (John C. Reilly), also an assistant manager, and also after the same job. (And an anglo, for the record.)

Thus the stage is set for a competition. But the stakes here are weird. For one, Reilly has a more naturally sympathetic screen presence than Scott, who usually plays frat boy types, so I kept forgetting who to root for.

And the script muddies things even more: Reilly’s character isn’t such a bad guy. In fact, he’s pretty likeable: a recovering drug addict who’s just trying to make a nice life for his family, and who’s continually humiliated throughout the film. He’s shown up and embarrassed far more often than Scott, which is just confusing.

For all its comic talent too, The Promotion just isn’t funny. A running gag involving a banjo-obsessed couple made me chuckle, but there are far too many funny people in this movie for the small amount of laughs it elicits.

Armisen, a scene-stealer everywhere else, stands around without much to do, and Bateman’s bit part is totally wasted.

That, plus a bad voiceover by Scott and the movie’s seemingly unintentional subtext of a white guy under constant attack by minorities and foreigners (including anglo Quebeckers) makes The Promotion difficult to enjoy.

The Promotion opens
this Friday, June 27

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