Tuesday, August 11, 2009

The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard


Running Time: An hour and a half

MPAA Rating: R

Seeing a movie called “The Goods”, audience members must invariably expect to, at some point, be delivered “the goods” whatever they may be. Something has been promised by the title. Maybe “the goods” are laughter, storylines, or even just interesting characters. Whatever they are, this film, just like the sleazy car salesmen it depicts, does not at any point deliver “the goods”.

The plot (and I use that term loosely here) is about a team of elite, auto-trading mercenaries who are called in to save a family-owned dealership from bankruptcy. Each character is rationed one additional issue that they must deal with during the course of the movie, leading to one of the worst attempts to create a story for the sole purpose of adding more vulgar jokes since the forgettable Observe & Report.

The film’s writers are new to working on the silver screen and television, and it definitely shows. The jokes take a rapid-fire approach, tossing as many at you as time will allow, but a vast majority of them fall flat. The movie also borrows the ideology of earlier movies, such as Step-Brothers, that “more vulgarity equals more hilarity”. Will Ferrell even makes a cameo in one of only a few interesting scenes in the whole movie. Fortunately for moviegoers and their wallets, he has posted that specific scene on his website.

The ensemble cast is made up of some of the best screen comedians alive today, so it is incredibly unfortunate that their talents are wasted on a garbage script. There are a couple of actors who manage to work through this problem, however. Charles Napier plays a disgruntled patriot who, often hilariously, vents his frustration with how society has changed and openly shares his less-than-P.C. opinions of customers and co-workers. Ed Helms, the increasingly popular actor of The Office and The Hangover fame, entertainingly plays the film’s antagonist: a clumsy boy band leader who gets everything he wants courtesy of his successful father.

The Goods tries to be funny by unleashing a slew of politically incorrect jokes at the viewer. A female pedophile, a man intent on cheating on his wife with another (reluctant) male, and even a self-described hate crime are not nearly as humorous as the writers seem to have thought they would be, or even as funny as they could have been. The standard has been set by movies like “The Hangover”, and now it is time for comedies to go beyond crude humor by itself. Entertainment and quality are traits that every movie must have if they want to stay on the screenings list for more than the first week. The Goods simply does not deliver its namesake.

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