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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The follow-up to"Swingers" is an amiable slice of Tarantino Lite.
Apr 9, 1999 | "Go" is the sort of movie that's so enthusiastically American, you'd almost think it was directed by a foreigner. In its one-night bacchanal of sex, drugs and a requisite dose of violence, the movie takes the viewer through the wild, wild West of big automobiles, big guns and all-you-can-eat seafood buffets. Leading the expedition are the aimless bumblers who typify both the American dream and its nightmare -- misfits forever finding cash, car keys and horny drunk girls thrown in their direction, but who are just as likely to hurl themselves into the path of something bigger and far less friendly in the process.
Director Doug Liman, who set off an unfortunate explosion of cocktail sipping and jitterbugging among the khakis crowd with his 1996 hit "Swingers," once again treads the Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas territory, this time with a shadier assortment of characters. The action takes place over a short period of time and with three distinct yet overlapping story lines, a device that is so patently "Pulp Fiction" it's embarrassingly obvious to even bring it up (but you'll probably be hard pressed to find a review of "Go" that won't). Unlike the denizens of the Tarantino opus, however, these fuck-ups on the wrong side of the law aren't quite so deeply ensconced in the seedy milieus of drugs and violence. They're youthful day-trippers, passing through the underworld and trying not to get roughed up.
The story begins and ends with Ronna (Sarah Polley from "The Sweet Hereafter"), a bored L.A. grocery store employee about to be kicked out of her apartment for not paying her rent. Luckily, her colleague Simon (Desmond Askew), a pasty-faced part-time drug dealer, is dying to get out of town and needs someone to cover his shift. Her luck gets even better when well-heeled TV actors Adam and Zack (Scott Wolf and Jay Mohr) show up in Simon's checkout line looking for a little more than orange juice and snack cakes.
Over the course of the next several hours, Ronna will wind up buying a sizable packet of pharmaceuticals, losing the goods, making a tidy sum fobbing off baby aspirin as Ecstasy to clueless ravers, being threatened with a gun and run over by a sports car. Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, Simon is busily crashing weddings, engaging in a tantric minage ` trois, setting hotels on fire, shooting bouncers and flashing around the wrong guy's credit card. And back in L.A., the two jittery actors are working out relationships, engaging reluctantly in a sting operation, covering up a crime and discovering, by way of a touchy-feely detective and his wife, just how open-minded they need to be to get some charges against them dropped.
