The best and choicest parts of The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard can begleaned from a quick glance at IMDb. The gloriously awful 70s inspired names: Don “The Goods” Ready (Jeremy Piven, Entourage), Brent Gage (David Koechner, Still Waiting) and best of all, Paxton Harding (Ed Helms, The Hangover) will likely provoke a quick chuckle, be quickly forgotten and allow one to save money while clearly telling the studio once and for all that it is time to stop letting Will Ferrell remake Anchorman.
Produced by Ferrell and Anchorman director Adam McKay, The Goods is entitled to a direct if thoroughly undeserved place in the Ferrell comedy lineage and inherits the naming genius which led to Ron Burgundy and Ricky Bobby. Perhaps Chapelle’s Show alumnus Neal Brennan was simply handed nothing but a list of names by the rookie writing team of Andy Stock and Rick Stempson.
After all, it is doubtful the script contained any semblance of characterization, as The Goods does not actually boast any of its own characters. Instead it is composed merely of cast-aways from better television shows. It is almost as if Ari Gold (Piven), Andy Bernard (Helms) and Buster Bluth (Tony Hale) were all purchased from their respective networks and repurposed for a foul, dumb comedy about selling cars after being given ass-kicking names.
Ready is a proudly ignorant, chauvinistic protagonist firmly in the Ferrell vein. Instead of reading the news or playing a sport, though, Ready acts as a car-selling “mercenary,” a “gun for hire” who sweeps into car dealerships to help them lie, cheat and scream their way to higher sales. His business credo is “I sell cars, motherf—er,” a far cry from the customer is always right or anything in The Art of Negotiation.
He is called in to rescue the floundering business of Ben Selleck (James Brolin, Bitter/Sweet) with an equally deranged team composed of Gage, Babs Merrick (Kathryn Hahn, Revolutionary Road) and Jibby Newsome (Ving Rhames, Give ‘Em Hell Malone). Their car-dealing competition, Harding, is the fiancée of Ready’s love interest, Ivy Selleck (Jordana Spiro, The Year of Getting to Know Us).
With that premise – flimsier than a Ford Pinto – to dick around with, The Goods begins to spin around in circles and doughnuts, trying to hit everything and anything in its path. The formerly respectable Brolin (father of the brilliant Josh) develops a crush on Gage and at one point displays a prominent prosthetic-aided erection as a punchline.
Merrick also begins inexplicably hitting on the Sellecks’s 10-year-old son with a 30-year-old body, Peter (Rob Riggle, The Hangover). Rhames falls prey to the overwhelming desire of white men to see large black men act effeminately by fornicating in rose petals and discussing his love for Dawson’s Creek, saying, “James Van Der Beek, my n—a!”
Of course, every one of these comedies is required to take a pot shot at some sort of social milieu. Films such as Semi-Pro and Anchorman could coast on sending up the excesses of the ’70s. The Goods, like Talledega Nights, aims to satirize Bush-era red state ignorance and hypocrisy: A hate crime is relabeled a “freedom crime” and bits of military marching beats and august horns are cobbled together to form the score.
Such humor, however, is dependent on the electoral map and changing political climate. Naturally, it becomes less funny every second and even begins to stink, being far past its expiration date. By contrast, jokes about orifices male and female are timeless and quickly take precedence over whatever mockery of capitalistic greed and exuberance had been intended. By the end, there isn’t even a single reference to the desperate plight of domestic auto sales.
To underscore this extreme lack of focus, Ferrell makes a cameo and dies while clutching a large, purple dildo. Thereby proving that he is now the cinematic equivalent of Lil Wayne, someone who shows up in every conceivable place, contributes nothing and gets paid gobs of money to do it.
It is time to place not only GM but the Ferrell money-churning machine into bankruptcy. As the domestic automakers surely know by now, the motto of the marketplace is adapt or die, and Ferrell’s team sure as hell hasn’t changed a single bit. One cannot find fault, therefore, with a hearty recommendation that audiences finally turn their back on Ferrell-associated comedies and refuse to fork over any cash for this clunker.
vmain13@umdbk.com
RATING: 1.5 out of 5 Stars