Although appearing moderately funny from the outset, The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard is a tired effort with tired characters and a tired premise. At this point I think we can say that the ignorant blowhard guy part has been done to death, and the Will Ferrell seal of approval doesn’t elevate this thing any higher than it deserves to be (although one could question Ferrell’s judgment as evidenced by Land of the Lost, but I digress). So instead of Ferrell holding the centre ring, we get Jeremy Piven doing Ron Burgundy by way of Ari Gold. And to compliment we get a cast of the usual weirdoes, reprobates and malcontents to provide back-up for something which I’m told is really just a rip-off of some little seen movie called Car Babes starring Ben Savage. That’s Fred’s younger brother.
While I certainly hope we haven’t come so far as to steal from Kevin Arnold’s kid brother, the fact of the matter is that there’s enough spare parts on The Goods that it’s the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang of movie comedies about car salesmen. Throw in some borderline pedophilia, shots at boy bands and their relevance and maybe a hate crime or two, and bam, you’ve got The Goods. And that little pun I made just then was about as funny as the movie gets. Any laughs are almost purely an afterthought or are accidently brought to the surface by the sheer audacity of the filmmakers trying to get away with something this lazy. Despite the other abundant presence of several actors that made The Hangover what is arguably summer’s best comedy, this is proof that they are at least as capable of contributing to one of the worst.
Piven is hot and cold as Don Ready, the man with the titular assets. So confident in his ability to sell cars that his business card simply reads “I sell cars, Motherf***er,” which I’m pretty is also how Henry Ford’s first business car read. Ready and his team are guns for hire, flying into a town, staying in the same crappy hotel chain and then taking off again for their next hoedown. The Ready team (another pun that used here makes the movie funnier than it was) is made up of David Koechner doing his alpha dog thing, Ving Rhames being the gruff-looking but inwardly loveable black guy and Kathryn Hahn whose character specializes in the adage “sex sells” when not toying with being a sexual predator.
The lot is Selleck’s based in a small town in California. Ben Selleck (What the...? James Brolin?) has been operating it for 40 years, but some 200 cars on his lot are getting “sun tanned.” It’s interesting that in these troubled economic times, when car lots are being closed as per order of the head office, that all Don Ready has to do is get a Deejay, an inflatable gorilla, a new TV ad and a few well placed speeches and cars move on the lot like free water in the middle of the desert. Other than that, anything goes: mark-ups, lies, misdirection. All the tactics that make car salesmen reviled.
But the main plot isn’t that these guys are trying to sell a lot of cars. No, it’s about how Don Ready has seemingly lost his mojo after the untimely death of an associate in a stunt gone wrong in Albuquerque. He’s now grasping at straws trying to prove that he’s not unaffected by his good friend’s untimely and grisly death. Additionally, there’s an unnecessary ticking time clock scenario where Selleck’s will be sold to a rival firm should not all the cars be sold by sundown on the last day of the long weekend. It was kind of pointless, and the result inevitable, but hey at least it gave Alan Thicke some work. But basically, it was padding. A strange artefact to find in a movie that’s barely 90 minutes long to have padding, but I guess without it this film would have been nothing more than a Funny or Die sketch. Perhaps that’s where it should have stayed.
Bright spots? There were a few I guess. Ed Helms leading a man band, or man boy band, called Big Ups! had its moments, although I think the time for snide remarks about boy bands generally, and O-Town specifically, are dated by about 10 years. Way dated. Does anybody even remember O-Town? Brought together on one of those build-a-band shows that pre-dated American Idol. Yup. Nothing. As I thought. But in the realm of musical players, my favourite character had to be another Office veteran Craig Robinson as the ironically named Deejay Request. It’s one of those little roles that’s wicked funny, perhaps even exaggeratedly so given the mess of a film he finds himself in. In this instance, finding something to complement The Goods on is like picking a dead carcass. A crude and moderately disgusting metaphor, but then again, so was The Goods.
