It’s hard to define the kind of movie “The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard” wants to be. A crass, crude comedy might be the closest thing I can label the film. But while sexual innuendo’s come fast and furious, the movie unapologetically jumps between a Top Gun for car salesman, and a movie directed by Jerry Zucker or Mel Brooks.
Jeremy Piven plays Don Ready, a Mercenary car salesman constantly on the road who lives to sell. His team includes a cast of characters as crude, foul mouthed, and hypersexual as Reading, played by Ving Rhames, Kathryn Hahn, and David Koechner. They sweep into a small California town to help a local car dealer, played by James Brolin, save his business.
While I was prepared for outlandish, over the top scenarios of salesman pulling every trick in the book to sell a car, I was not prepared for this movie to leave the reality of Earth and shove me onto the surface of Saturn. Every cliche of a movie is in this, from Don Ready winning over his love interest in less than 3 days, to the death of a best friend who still haunts Ready, to his team of low life, immoral scammers who have little regard for the law, woman, men, family, and religion.
It seemed like this film was originally a much more clean, but probably stale story of a car dealer needing to hire someone to help save the business. But in the hands of Piven and Will Farrell, who plays the cliched dead best friend, the filmmakers took the easy way out of making a script that didn’t have laughs funny. Crude sexual humor and gratuitous, foul mouth language in awkward situations. Like Ready asking loudly the car dealers daughter over a family dinner if she was talking about (insert crass word for female genitals.) Wow, that was so funny!
The problem with the film was that the scenario seemed so outlandish to begin with that we needed something to ground it in reality, and that never came. No one can sell 211 cars in 3 days. At least, not to 211 individuals. So if you are going to tell me a story about how someone does it, it needs to have something, anything, that gives me a shred of hope that this will make sense. Sadly, that never happens.
Instead, we get some ridiculous montage of Ready roaming through the desert after a one night stand has left him heartbroken only for him to find a junk yard full of rusted cars and his big wheel that he talked about and showed in a flashback, turned upside; a hollow remembrance of his past.
As for the parody reference I made earlier (Jerry Zucker directed movies such as Airplane and Scary Movie 3), from alligators being let loose in a California town to chain saws appearing out of no where for rioting customers to use on scared salesman, the filmmakers made it clear they were going to show you whatever they had to make this movie funny. A parody movie relies on cliches to wink at the audience about how every movie has this. But in “The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard”, the filmmakers aren’t winking; they’re furiously doing whatever they can to keep you laughing so you won’t notice that nothing in this movie makes any sense.
A for effort, D for execution. Take out all the awkward scenes full of inappropriate language, sexual references, and jokes about strippers either being single moms, poor college students, or coke heads, and you are left with a bland story that really had nothing to say.
7 out of 10 (shots of vodka)
*My rating scale is based on the amount of liquor you would need in order to make the movie enjoyable. In this case, if you had a total of 10 shots to take, 7 would be enough to make you enjoy the movie. Which means, wether you drink 7 shots or not, this movie will leave you hungover.