The Promotion

Lento e ripetitivo, in definitiva: noioso. Nonostante le buone premesse il film è un mezzo fiasco. Manca la voglia di graffiare veramente. Ci si accontenta di qualche gag e si sparge buonismo un po' dovunque.

“The Promotion” tells you everything you might want to know but were too uninterested to ask about working as an assistant manager in a supermarket. As this sweet, ineffectual comedy follows two sad sacks competing for the job of manager at a new branch of a Chicago grocery chain, it pointedly avoids the raucous bad-boy clowning of the typical Everyguy farce.

Screenwriter Steve Conrad likes his protagonists to suffer a little en route to finding a better place and not in the usual sitcomic ways. He writes distinctive dialogue -- tart, off-kilter, full of odd little details (as in his offbeat script for the Nicolas Cage starrer "The Weather Man" and in the more conventional, true-life tale "The Pursuit of Happyness").