The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard - Review

The trouble with subversive, better-than-expected comedies like Billy Madison or Hot Rod is that you spend the rest of your life chasing that happy surprise. Every time you sit down for a comedy expecting the worst only to find yourself with a few genuine laughs in the opening minutes, that hope sets in: could this be another undiscovered gem? Could this be another comedy that gets away with greatness under the guise of being terrible and forgettable?

As The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard began to unfold, those familiar thoughts began to creep in. Whether it was the limp trailers or the terrible title, I wasn't expecting much from The Goods; the fact that I was laughing at all both surprised and confused me. In the end, it's roughly half the movie I thought it would be -- crude, sloppy and unfunny -- and half of a movie I was excited to find. In the current comedy landscape, I'd almost call that a success.

Entourage's Jeremy Piven stars as Don "The Goods" Ready, a gun-for-hire salesman brought in to a Temecula, CA car dealership to unload its entire inventory in a single weekend. Along for the ride are his partners, Jibby (Ving Rhames), numbers wizard Brent (David Koechner, star of every comedy ever made) and sexed-up Babs (Kathyn Hahn). When Don finds himself falling for the dealer's daughter (Jordana Spiro), he's got to steal her away from her fiancee: rival car dealer and adult-boy-band hopeful Paxton Harding (Ed Helms, as funny here as in The Hangover).

There's not much of a plot there, and that's probably for the best: when The Goods tries to focus on its story (or even worse, Piven's character "arc"), it falls very flat. It works better as a gag carrier. Luckily, there are some very funny gags in the film, such as an ongoing joke about comedian Craig Robinson (of Zack and Miri Make a Porno and Miss March) as a character named DJ Request, though he refuses to play any requests. Robinson is funny every second he's on screen. Another good joke involves Rob Riggle (late of SNL and The Daily Show) playing a 10-year old boy with a glandular problem; funnier still is the fact that Hahn is constantly trying to sleep with him. It's a joke that the filmmakers (chiefly first-time film director Neil Brennan, a co-creator of Chappelle's Show) know how to make funny without really crossing the line.

But The Goods is also hugely flawed and terribly uneven. For every joke that works, there's at least one or two that don't: an ongoing joke about James Brolin's car dealer trying to bed David Koechner isn't funny once, much less the tenth time -- plus, there's essentially zero payoff. That's a lot of time to invest in a gag that goes nowhere. Another potentially good bit, featuring comic T.J. Miller (there are a host of comedian cameos, including Morgan Murphy and Jessica St. Clair) as a skydiver strapped to Piven's back, is funny until the film torpedoes it by calling attention to the joke. That scene is like The Goods in a nutshell: some truly inspired humor undone by bad ideas and just as many jokes that don't work.

Perhaps the worst idea of the film is the casting of Jeremy Piven in the lead. I've like Piven elsewhere, but there's not really any moment of The Goods where he seems like the right choice for the role. He's neither funny nor charismatic; instead, he's an aggressive a-hole bursting with self-satisfied smarm. I'm not sure who should have played the role (though Will Ferrell, a producer on the film, might have made a good choice), but it's clear that Piven is all wrong. While it's clear that he's going for a Bill-Murray-in-Stripes vibe, he comes across more like...well...Jeremy Piven in PCU. With a much fuller head of hair, of course.

• The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard is Rated R for sexual content, nudity, pervasive language and some drug material.
• Running Time: 89 minutes
• Release Date: 8/15/09
• Studio: Paramount Vantage