Today’s quick review: The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard. Freelance car salesman Don Ready (Jeremy Piven) travels around the country with his team (Kathryn Hahn, Ving Rhames, and David Koechner), making the sales that the locals can’t handle. For his latest job, Don and his team are called to Temecula, California, where Ben Selleck (James Brolin) needs to sell over two hundred cars in one weekend to save his struggling dealership.
The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard is a raunchy comedy about a car salesman whose bold tactics have made him a success at the expense of his personal life. Over the course of a holiday weekend, Don Ready uses every trick in his arsenal to keep Ben’s business alive and prove himself to Ben’s daughter Ivy (Jordana Spiro). The Goods aims to be a boisterous comedy full of outrageous situations and bad decisions, but both its taste and execution fall short.
The Goods aims low with its humor. The jokes are crude and explicit, with questionable content that will make sensitive viewers very uncomfortable. The movie does earn some modest laughs from Don’s slick sales tactics and the sheer audacity of some of its jokes, but the humor is inconsistent. Even when the movie is firing on all cylinders, it never manages to break free of its worst ideas, leaving it a string of hit-or-miss gags and little more.
Nor does The Goods have the story needed to pick up the slack. The movie makes a passing nod at character growth for Don, but it cashes in his personal development for laughs at every opportunity. Normally, this would be a favorable trade for a comedy, letting the film play to its strengths without getting bogged down with drama. But in this case, letting Don’s story play out naturally would have given The Goods some much-needed heart.
The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard will appeal to fans of a certain style of raunchy, irreverent comedy. To the movie’s credit, it has a talented cast and a script that isn’t afraid to run with even its most ridiculous jokes. For the right viewer, these qualities will make it pure, unadulterated fun. But the movie’s unreliable comedy and minimal amount of story mean that its best features largely go to waste. Most viewers will want to steer clear.
For an underdog sports comedy with similar flaws, try The Benchwarmers. For a comedy that’s as explicit, more violent, and similarly unreliable, try Game Over, Man!. For a comedy that takes the same ridiculousness and puts it to better use, try Dodgeball or Hot Rod. For a more memorable comedy about hedonism and high-pressure sales tactics, try The Wolf of Wall Street.
5.8 out of 10 on IMDB. I give it a 5.5 for crude comedy with mixed execution.