The Goods is a raunchy 80s-style comedy. In fact, it bears more than a passing
resemblance to an actual 80s comedy, Kurt Russell's Used Cars. Both films
feature a car dealership on the brink of a financial failure which can only be
averted if the sales team can pull off an incredible feat while the clock is
ticking. In both films, the team's failure will result in the dealership passing
into the hands of a slick and despised rival. Both films feature a love story
between the amoral hot-shot salesman and the relatively innocent daughter of the
man who owns the dealership.
In the newer film, Jeremy Piven takes over the Kurt Russell role and does his
usual Ari Gold thing, once again mining the lode of comedy inherent in the
single-mindedness of the obsessively driven. That is both good and bad. Piven
has that character down to a science, so the comedy works pretty well, but we
don't really like him or any other character. The characters we are supposed to
cheer for are as unattractive as the ones we are supposed to hiss, so we
ultimately just don't care about resolution of the matter which is supposed to
be the film's driving force - the question of whether the dealership gets
rescued.
The film might still have clicked if the characters could have drawn us into the
love story, but that didn't work either. That failure was not so much the
writers' as Piven's. He just doesn't have the dramatic acting chops to convey
any sense of sensitivity, sincerity, or vulnerability. When he tries, it seems
like mock sincerity, Bill Murray style. Because Pivs always seems like a broad
comic character rather than a real person, we just don't care whether he gets
the girl or whether he gets redeemed.
On top of the film's other liabilities, there is a particularly ridiculous
back-story involving the death of a sales colleague (Will Ferrell) who was
willing to do anything for a sales event until he was killed while trying to
execute a spectacular sales gimmick. This is less likely to make you laugh as to
make you roll your eyes upward.
The failure of the plot/character framework is a shame, because the jokes are
pretty good. While the gags sometimes swing and miss by an embarrassing amount,
and there are no comic homers, the script overall manages to deliver a fairly
good laughter average with a lot of solid singles. Mixed in among the tasteless
or failed gags and the uninvolving plot, there's a lot of funny and cheerfully
vulgar material that does work and could have been the basis for a top-notch
comedy.
