Star vehicles, by definition, depend on the appeal of their stars. So, before you pay to see The Goods: Live Hard. Sell Hard., you should ask yourself how much you like Jeremy Piven. The Entourage Emmy winner is a used car salesman savant named Don Ready. He’s as abrasive like Piven’s Ari Gold, only in worse clothes. But if this is all Piven’s got, haven’t we seen it already?
Unfortunately, even though there’s a good cast of likely and unlikely comic heroes mingling the used car lot, Piven gets most of the funny. And that’s where this one bottlenecks.
The Goods‘ best laugh occurs at the beginning. Car sales guru Don Ready cajoles a flight attendant and her fellow crew members to let him smoke in-flight in memory of the glory days of air travel (“After all, when people were allowed to smoke on airplanes, we put a man on the moon”). Before long, Ready and his car lot tricksters have turned the plane into a mile high party.
Once in Temecula, Ready and Co. pull out all the stops familiar to fans of the 1980 Robert Zemeckis comedy Used Cars in order to sell every last auto at the dealership. Non-stop wisecracks, multiple gags involving erections and homosexuality and a silly romance between Ready and the car lot owner’s daughter help push the story to its anti-climactic conclusion.
While the movie’s main characters are, for the most part, pretty entertaining and well-realized, the best parts of the movie contained bit characters Teddy Dang, who plays a Korean American with no game and Charles Napier, who plays a WWII vet and full-time hard ass who can’t seem to say anything politically correct. Ed Helms is also great as the boy band bad guy, and Rob Riggle kills as a 10-year-old in a 40-year-old’s body. Will Ferrell also makes a cameo in the movie, and he’s very funny as Ready’s best friend, who dies when he jumps out of a plane dressed as Abe Lincoln and his chute doesn’t open.
So why does it falter? The comedy concept is solid: Jeremy Piven plays a hard-driving used-car salesman brought in with his freelance team to save a failing small-town dealership. Yeah, you’ve seen it before, but welcome to Hollywood, right? It’s the execution that’s out of alignment in The Goods, a slightly dinged endeavor from the makers of Talladega Nights: Barely controlled scenes of genial, scattershot political incorrectness (sexual, racial, you name it) bump up awkwardly against a soft, sad story of economic downturn.
I think that’s the kind of stuff that’s ultimately missing in the movie: It’s more frat party than anything else, and you don’t really have anybody to root for because Don Ready is such a lowlife. Yeah, there are a few places where things pick up a little bit, but most of those are jokes that could happen in any movie and have no bearing at all on the story in the film.
It’s disappointing writers Andy Stock and Rick Stempson fail to come up with something fresher and more outrageous for The Goods. After all, few comedies can claim such an extraordinary comic ensemble: Piven, Rhames, Koechner, Hahn, Ed Helms from The Hangover and James Brolin, the latter in fine support as the closeted owner of Selleck Motors. For first-time director Neal Brennan, who still retains respect thanks to his work on Dave Chappelle’s Show, his missteps on The Goods are proof that feature length comedy is ten times more difficult than sketch comedy.
Film companies who seek out business with Gary Sanchez Productions will see The Goods as a rare misstep from the comedy factory. Piven’s career will also continue unscathed. Brennan, however, will have to work harder to get past The Goods. After all, the faults of the film, its missed opportunities, lie mainly with him. Which is kind of sad, really, because when all things are considered, it’s not as if the movie is horrible or even really bad-it’s just … blase.