DON READY (Jeremy Piven) is a closer. He’s a salesman of
mythic proportions, and his ability to sell any car to anyone at any
time has him shooting all over the country with a team of salesmen,
doing mercenary work to move used cars off the lot. In short, Don
Ready’s got the goods.
Too bad The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard doesn’t quite make
the sale, but really, the movie doesn’t act like it’s trying very hard.
It’s more or less a series of gags strung along against the backdrop of
a Temecula, California, used car lot, where Ready and his
crew—Jibby (Ving Rhames), Brent (David Koechner), and Babs (a
brassy Kathryn Hahn, definitely unafraid to play ball with the
boys)—arrive to help poor Mr. Selleck (James Brolin) sell some
cars.
It’s the first feature film directed by Neal Brennan, a veteran of
Chappelle’s Show, and this movie possesses some of that infamous
sketch show’s fearless irreverence. The movie wastes little time with
exposition, and the best jokes are character based, such as Babs
getting hot under the collar for a 10-year-old boy with a pituitary
disorder (Rob Riggle), or a hired deejay named DJ Request (the reliably
excellent Craig Robinson) refusing to play the songs people want to
hear, or Mr. Selleck’s daughter’s spiky-haired douchebag fiancée
(Ed Helms, whose paycheck was presumably cut before The
Hangover‘s opening weekend) reminiscing the night his band opened
for O-Town.
But the little that Brennan makes work here, including a funny Will
Ferrell cameo, only emphasizes that The Goods feels like a
sketch padded out to feature length. Piven’s no help either; he leaves
it to his supporting cast to sell all the laughs. The Goods makes it off the lot, but not without a lot of stalling.