A version of this review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

Offbeat but also formulaic, vulgar but not nearly as much as it likes to think, Cedar Rapids has plenty of heart, but frankly it isn’t very funny. The word “meh” was coined for films such as this.

Small-town insurance salesman Tim Lippe (Ed Helms) has never left the tiny hamlet of Brown Valley, Wisconsin. Never flown on a jet. Never stayed at a hotel. For Lippe, the big, bad city isn’t Manhattan, Los Angeles or Chicago—it’s Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It is there, at an annual insurance convention where Lippe is charged with upholding his mom-and-pop company’s stellar reputation, that his innocence, naïvety and, ultimately, integrity will be challenged by three convention veterans—the foul-mouthed and boorish Zeigler (John C. Reilly), straight-shooting Wilkes (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) and seductive Joan (Anne Heche). What happens in Cedar Rapids, stays in Cedar Rapids—or does it?

Still riding high on his post-Hangover surge, The Office’s Helms is enjoying some well-deserved notoriety and ably takes the lead in this ensemble piece, even if his nerd-next-door shtick is best served in company. Once upon a time, John C. Reilly was a dramatic actor. While he’s always dabbled in comedy, it wasn’t until Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby that Reilly’s career seemed to change course entirely. It’s not that he’s unfunny. Far from it. But I miss the John C. Reilly that used to frequent Paul Thomas Anderson’s early films. Heche, who’s been hiding out on television the past several years, is a welcome, if not-at-first recognizable, injection of estrogen amongst a raucous assemblage of testosterone.

Cedar Rapids isn’t unfunny—it’s just that it’s rarely laugh-out-loud funny. Aside from a quite hilarious bit building off Whitlock Jr.’s history with the incomparable HBO crime drama, The Wire, most of the script is good for sustained chuckles but seldom guffaws. What it does have going for it is heart. In the end, Cedar Rapids is a message film. It understands that integrity isn’t integrity until it is tested, and earns its main character’s moral victories the hard-fought way.

© Copyright 2011 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.

Directed by Miguel Arteta
Starring: Ed Helms, John C. Reilly, Anne Heche, Isiah Whitlock Jr. Stephen Root, Kurtwood Smith, Sigourney Weaver
Rated R for crude and sexual content, language and drug use.
Running Time: 86 minutes