Editor’s Note: This film review was originally written and published in 2010.
I know I’m in for a real treat when I hear the sentence, “I feel like a smurf just jizzed in my eyes!”, in the first two minutes of a film.
The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard is a 2009 film by director Neal Brennan, a relative newcomer whose only other film is the VH1 teen spoof Totally Awesome. The films stars Jeremy Piven as Don Ready, a “no-guts, no-glory” Hannibal Smith for an A-Team-esque group of mercenary-for-hire used car salesmen. The team, consisting of Piven, Ving Rhames, David Koechner and Kathryn Hahn, travel around the United States helping car dealerships that desperately need to move cars off their lots.
They are hired by Ben Selleck (wonderfully played by James Brolin), whose California dealership is struggling with mounting debt. Ready promises to sell all 211 cars over the three-day Fourth of July weekend.
Comparisons are naturally drawn against the 1980 Zemeckis film Used Cars (read my review) starring Kurt Russell. The Goods has definitely been inspired by the dark comedy and irreverence, as well as setting, of Used Cars, but it is also its own creation.
The film is refreshingly offensive. In an era where Hollywood films are increasingly sterile and sanitized, this flick pulls few punches. Babs (Kathryn Hahn) spends the film trying to bed a 10-year-old boy (who albeit is in the body of a 30-year-old man, thanks to a pituitary problem), Jibby (Ving Rhames) lists his extremely sordid sex history while longing for a lot stripper, and Ben Selleck (James Brolin) develops and attempts to act upon gay sex fantasies about Brent (David Koechner). And Will Farrell plummets to his death carrying a purple dildo.
Conservatives would be wise to skip this one. It’s actually rated “R” for something other than gratuitous violence.
The film co-stars Judd Apatow alums Ken Jeong and Craig Robinson. Jeong is salesman Teddy Dang, who is the victim of a robbery and a hate crime within the first ten minutes of the film, and then he drifts into the background. He is replaced by Craig Robinson as the rooftop DJ with an intense dislike for requests, despite being named “DJ Request”. This bitter antagonism actually lets Ogden Edsl’s forgotten masterpiece “Dead Puppies” make it into a feature film soundtrack. Terrific performances are also turned in by Alan Thicke as Stu Harding (the owner of a rival car lot), Ed Helms as Paxton Harding (lead singer of “man-band” The Big Ups) and scene-stealing Charles Napier as Dick Lewiston, a crotchety curmudgeon who sells cars but never really left the front lines of World War II.
