Producers Will Ferrell and Adam McKay deliver the goods in this flat-out raunchy comedic romp skillfully driven into the ground by Jeremy Piven (Entourage) with a stellar supporting crew (David Koechner, Ving Rhames and Kathryn Hahn, along with high-octane gas from James Brolin).
Don Ready (Piven) leads a team of mercenary used car salesmen able to strut onto a flat-lined lot and resuscitate it with shot of sweaty raunch and rocking roll. When a closeted, small-time dealer (Brolin) with a wacky family and an even more eccentric sales staff makes the 911 call to Ready’s rowdy wild bunch, you know each and every member of the team will have a moment of pause that forces them to reconsider their hard-living and hard-selling ways, but not in any conventional sense.
Piven certainly knows he’s being asked to play a version of Entourage’s Ari Gold, right down to the coarse sentimentality that sneaks up on his snarky uber-agent, but he’s not afraid to go for excess to set Ready apart from his bread-and-butter character. And it is fabulous to sit back and marvel at the foul-mouthed brilliance of Hahn, who deserves a movie devoted entirely to her character (much like Neil Patrick Harris as Neil Patrick Harris in the Harold and Kumar flicks).
There’s nothing sketchy in the set-ups or the incessant punch lines of The Goods, just classic cult laughs to waste the night away. Grade: B
Opens Aug. 14. Check out theaters and show times, see the film's trailer and get theater details here.
