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Jeremy Piven is the sort of actor who may be perfect for supporting roles, but makes a most irritating leading man. That’s certainly borne out by “The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard,” an extraordinarily abrasive (and ill-time, given the recent turmoil in the auto industry) tale of a take-no-prisoners car salesman and his equally rabid crew who are brought in to save a collapsing small-town dealership. Crass, stupid and ineptly made, this car-lot farce is so awful that it ought to qualify for the “Cash for Clunkers” program on grounds of polluting the atmosphere.
Piven stars as Don Ready, a ferociously fast-talking bundle of aggression who’s engaged by Ben Selleck (James Brolin) to rescue his flailing car lot and its incompetent salesmen, who include psycho Dick Lewiston (Charles Napier), Teddy Dang (Ken Jeong), the hapless Korean he torments for Pearl Harbor, and wimpy Wade Zooha (Tony Hale). Ben also has family problems. His daughter Ivy (Jordana Spiro) is determined to marry Paxton (Ed Helms), the doofus son of Stu Harding (Alan Thicke), the competitor who’s destroying his business. And his son Peter (Rob Riggle) is actually only ten, though he has a medical condition that makes him look thirty.
Don’s a hired gun with his own colorful crew: Babes Merrick (Kathryn Hahn), a foul-mouthed ball-breaker; Jibby Newsome (Ving Rhames), a smooth-talking black man aching for real love; and Brent Gage (David Koechner), a hot-tempered numbers-cruncher. About half the script is devoted to their sales scams, which involve putting on a big Fourth of July sale, complete with dancers and disc jockey. The other delves into their unseemly private lives. Don thinks he’s discovered a long-lost son in a young salesman while falling for Ivy; Babs latches onto Peter, despite the fact he’s really only a kid; Jibby finds a first romance with one of the strippers hired for the sale; and Brent is appalled when Ben hits on him.
The whole point of “The Goods” is to be as loud, raucous and raunchy as possible, and unfortunately it succeeds all too well. That’s probably to be expected from a movie co-produced by Will Ferrell, who appears in a few flashbacks as Don’s dead partner. Happily it’s but a brief cameo; after “Land of the Lost,” nobody wants to look at Ferrell very long. But unfortunately that leaves Piven to carry the movie, which he does about as well as he did in the wretched campus would-be comedy “PCU” fifteen years ago. He’s just doing Ari Gold in a different milieu, to diminishing returns. Piven doesn’t get much help from the so-called supporting cast, with Rhames surprisingly subdued, Hahn overbearing, and the ever-present Koechner, as usual, twisting his mouth into every imaginable shape while delivering his dead-on-arrival lines. Brolin looks bewildered (and perhaps he’s acting), Helms does his customary goofball shtick (which is frankly getting tiresome) as a boy-band wannabe, and Riggle repeats his oblivious routine from “The Daily Show.” But Napier’s turn as a short-fused bigot at least has a realistic underpinning, however vile the determinedly anti-PC rants he regularly spouts.
Still, one can’t blame the cast too much; director Neal Brennan’s laissez-faire ways leave all of them to fend pretty much for themselves. Neither he nor his crew seem to have much facility in structuring scenes or choreographing the action with any style. The picture looks as ugly as the screenplay by Andy Stock and Rick Stempson makes it sound.
If the honchos at Paramount Vantage can sell these wretched “Goods” to the public, they’re even better than Don Ready.