Movie Review - 'The Goods: Live Hard. Sell Hard.'

The Goods: Live Hard. Sell Hard. Starring Jeremy Piven, Ving Rhames, Ed Helms, and James Brolin Directed by Neal Brennan Rated R

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. It's not that Piven isn't funny or can't be funny, but in The Goods, it's one note over and over again. That note isn't all that funny to begin with, so after 90 minutes, the gears are ground pretty severely. It doesn't help that Piven seems to be aware that there's not too much to Don Ready, and almost nothing we haven't seen him do before, so Piven goes community theater on us: Everything. Gets. Loud. And. Big. And because the movie tries so hard to push Piven's character, the rest of the cast - comprised of such names as Ed Helms, Craig Robinson, Alan Thicke, James Brolin, and Ving Rhames - are almost completely spoiled, given their own one-note jokes, most of which are of the cheap, easy, sophomoric description. The Goods is the directorial debut of Neal Brennan, who co-created Chappelle's Show, which was one of the most consistently inventive and daringly bawdy comedy show in years. But you can't see any evidence that these two projects have anything in common, and that's a shame. The basic premise has the potential to be pretty funny: A gang of used car liquidators travel from town to town, set up a big sale (the kind at which they fill circus tents in mall parking lots), and when the dust settles, the crew has skipped town with their money but very few sales to show for it. There is a John Landis documentary called Slasher that chronicles pretty much the same kind of cultural sinkhole, although it's a more serious look at the grift behind it all. I think that's the kind of stuff that's ultimately missing in The Goods: 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 Goods. I have a feeling makers of R-rated comedies will actively study The Hangover in the years to come. How did it do so many things right, so few things wrong, and convince all of those people to pay to see a movie with no star power? And hopefully, those filmmakers will learn how to make a great comedy from that movie and how not to make one from this.