The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard
Paramount Vantage
R
90 Minutes
2009
What a year for comedies this has been. Whether it's family-friendly fair like Pixar's incredible Up, raunchy comedy like The Hangover, or flat-out offensive like Bruno, 2009's lineup of comedies has been pretty strong. The Goods has some incredibly stiff competition to live up to, and it didn't quite sell me that it deserves to be at the top of the list of 2009's funniest.
Produced by Adam McKay and Will Ferrell, The Goods is another in a long line of nonsense comedies like Anchorman or Talladega Nights. It has its moments, but it can't sustain itself for the duration of its rather short running time. Still, if you've got time to kill, you could do much worse.
Notorious Hollywood jerk Jeremy Piven stars as car salesman Don Ready, a man who could sell books to a school for the blind. When a dealership in Temecula, California needs his help to clear their lot or be forced into bankruptcy, he and his crack team head out to get them back in the black.
The Goods relies on the strength of Piven's performance as a sleazy, arrogant strip-club aficionado of a salesman, and on this it delivers. Piven's own personal ego is put to good use as Don Ready, a man who believes he is nothing short of the most amazing person on Earth and can talk his way out of, or into, anything. To be frank, this is the first time I've believed one of his characters since his turn as the rather douchey Ray in 1993's Judgment Night. He already looked 20 years too old to play college student "Droz" Andrews fifteen years ago in the cult comedy PCU, and for all his success on the HBO series Entourage, I find it hard to get past that hair. Come on, Jeremy, you were going bald back in the 90s - nobody is buying into those auburn curls on top of your head.
My personal dislike for Piven aside, Don Ready is a believable character, and the fact that he's not entirely likable helps convey the car salesman motif. The rest of Ready's team is fleshed out with Jibby Newsome (Ving Rhames), who seeks a woman to "make love" to for the first time (not to be confused with having sex), Brent Gage (David Koechner), who is no stretch for Koechner as it is practically the same character he always plays, and Babs Merrick (Kathryn Hahn), a buxom beauty who uses sex as her selling tool. Hahn played a similarly lusty character in 2008's Step Brothers and is well on her way to becoming the next Jennifer Coolidge (and I mean that as a compliment).
Several other comedy regulars appear as well, including Ken Jeong and Daily Show veterans Ed Helms and Rob Riggle. Though Jeong seems to be in everything nowadays, I always find his characters amusing and he is the butt of several of the funnier gags here. Helms plays Paxton Harding, an overconfident, egotistical daddy's boy who has dreams of becoming a pop music superstar with his "man band" BigUps. Harding's father owns an import car dealership and seeks to buy out Selleck Motors, while Paxton himself is engaged to the daughter of his father's competitor, Ivy (played by the lovely Jordana Spiro). Helms is given some decent lines, but is nowhere near as effective as the increasingly hysterical Stu in The Hangover, though it should be noted that his role isn't quite as meaty either.
Riggle plays Peter Selleck, the youngest son of the family that owns the struggling car lot. A pituitary problem has caused him to age rapidly, trapping a 10-year-old boy in the body of a 40-year-old man - one whom Babs takes an inappropriate liking to. Lastly, Craig Robinson plays DJ Request, a slightly crazed strip-club disc jockey who actually does not take requests. Robinson's lines are almost non-stop funny, and it's a shame his character is utilized so little. I would be remiss not to mention the brief cameo by Will Ferrell himself, which results in the most outlandish and hilarious gag of the film.
Most comedies aren't going to throw a lot of plot twists at you, so The Goods can be forgiven for being incredibly predictable, but the problem with the film is that so much of its potential feels squandered just to make a lot of the same old jokes we've seen in dozens of other comedies. After some good setups, many of the gags are left untouched again. Ken Jeong gets some big laughs early on, but is barely used after the first 30 minutes, and even the setup between Riggle and Hahn ultimately runs out of steam and seems forgotten about.
Ultimately, much of The Goods is about one-liners rather than big setups and payoffs. A lot of its best moments are single lines, such as Jibby referring to Dawson's Creek star James Van Der Beek by the n-word, Don calling an overweight, curly-haired young man at a karaoke bar "Superbad", or Peter unwittingly comparing a baseball glove to Babs's vagina. It's crude, I know, but it's still funny.
Honestly, The Goods may have actually benefitted from being a bit longer, just as an excuse to let some of the gags play out a bit more. As it is, there are certainly enough laughs to warrant a matinee showing or a rental, but not much else. In light of this year's other success stories, especially The Hangover, which set the bar for raunchy comedy for the foreseeable future, it's tough to truly say The Goods delivers what it promises.
i didn't liked this film, the idea of film laike others pop like films...
Posted by: Mikroautobusų nuoma | October 26, 2009 at 08:58 AM