Low key, slow paced comedy starring Sean William Scott and John C. Reilly.
This is a tale of two grocery store employees both vying for the managerial position at a new store in town and the lengths they'll go to, or not go to, to get the big job.
Scots character is a long time assistant manager at the store and he and wife Jenna Fischer, who just fuckin lights up the screen, are trying to buy a new house, so the potential promotion is major deal for them and it looks like Scotts character is a shoe-in for it until Reilly arrives from Canada, transferred from a sister store, and begins to impress the bosses.
From there things settle in very nicely into a laid back sort of dark comedy. The pace is slow but not tedious. Things unfold very naturally and the comedy comes from real life situations and how the two men try and one up each other to impress the bosses.
You'll never really be rolling, but the tone of the film stays funny all the way through as Reilly deals with his alcoholism and self help tapes and Scott tries to figure out a way to rid the parking lot of a local gang, hilariously referred to by Reilly as a "batch of black apples" in a pretty fucking funny scene.
Scott is pretty good as the more reserved of the two and his natural energy lays below the surface enough to know it's there but he doesn't go full on crazy like we've seen in most of his movies.
Reilly gets more of the absurdest moments, but he has a fantastic way of making even the strangest outbursts seem level headed and not devolve into buffoonery.
Maybe most importantly, the movie does a great job of sucking you in and making you care about who actually wins out in the end as I was openly rooting for a particular victor in the last 20 minutes or so of the film, so the story is pretty good too.
All in all you'll have a pretty good time if you get The Promotion.
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