'Cedar Rapids': Big city, small town

In the Cedar Rapids of "Cedar Rapids" you can find a crack den and a hooker within spitting distance of your Best Western, which is just part of the movie's overarching joke about small-town vs. big-city America: The moral superiority/hypocrisy of the hinterlands isn't just unfounded, but dryly funny. Sometimes.

While director Miguel Arteta mines cheap jokes out of the naiveté of his lead rube, Tim Lippe (Ed Helms), "Cedar Rapids" does harbor a subtext of social criticism.

In Tim's hometown, chirpy Wisconsinites live in a bucolic daydream, while around them telenovelas are breaking out: Tim is having an affair with his former schoolteacher (Sigourney Weaver). His "family-friendly" Brown Star Insurance is a cutthroat operation.

When the firm's top salesman, Roger (Thomas Lennon), is found dead by autoerotic asphyxiation, it throws Brown Star for a loop. The award that Roger had brought home two years in a row is presented not just for sales, but devotion to God, country and morality. Tim is dispatched to the annual insurance convention in Cedar Rapids - it might as well be Paris - to bring back the gold.

Helms ("The Office," "The Hangover") wears a look of sleepy stupidity for the first part of the film, a heavy-handed foreshadowing of the wake-up call he gets from the overage delinquents at the convention. Chief among them is full-time cut-up Ziegler (John C. Reilly). Joan, vaguely reminiscent of Vera Farmiga in "Up in the Air" without the pathos, gets a sexily prankish portrayal by Anne Heche. Not exactly a grossout comedy, not exactly biting social satire, "Cedar Rapids" doesn't have the confidence to go anywhere boldly, although it's been awhile since the hero of a movie smoked crack for laughs.