Director: Miguel Arteta
The state of film comedy today is decidedly a sad one. Why does a film like Cedar Rapids feel so heavily focus-grouped? It's a small movie with Ed Helms as its star. The performances in this film are excellent, and it's a who's who of solid character actors, but nothing that happens in this movie makes sense in a comedy or really otherwise. Things happen because they have to.
Cedar Rapids could've been an actual character study of a man from a small town blown away by the 'bright lights' of the eponymous city, or it could have been a very broad comedy about the same. Instead the film tries to be both and ends up being neither. It's totally dead on arrival until John C. Reilly shows up playing a smaller, insurance-selling version of his character from Walk Hard.
The worst part is that there seems to have been some sort of religious satire in this movie, but it's been so defanged and watered down that it becomes a red herring. I'm sure this film got a lot of people walking out of the theater at the end saying 'Yeah, that was okay', but unfortunately too often that's what the film industry is shooting for these days.
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