The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard (2009)

Watching The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard is a lot like considering buying one of the used cars in the film — it’s got some dents and damage, and the salesman is kind of sleazy, but you might take it for a spin, at least until something better comes along.

The movie centers on Selleck Motors, a nearly bankrupt car dealership in Temecula, California. If owner Ben Selleck (James Brolin) can’t move more than 200 cars off his lot during a three-day 4th of July weekend, his business is through. To motivate his demoralized sales staff, Selleck calls in a professional liquidator, a master of car sales hype and trickery named Don “The Goods” Ready (Jeremy Piven), who travels the country with his team of salespeople: Brent (David Koechner), Jibby (Ving Rhames), and Babs (Kathryn Hahn). During the long weekend as, predictably, sales are won and sanity is lost, Don manages to fall for Selleck’s daughter Ivy (Jordana Spiro), who is engaged to Paxton Harding (Ed Helms), “man band” member and son and heir apparent of Selleck’s rival, car dealer Stu Harding (Alan Thicke). While that love triangle plays out to an obvious conclusion, romance is all over the place, as Babs falls for Stu’s 10-year-old son (who has a “pituitary condition” and is hilariously played by beefcake actor Rob Riggle), Jibby seeks to “make love” to a woman for the first time (though he’s done just about everything else between the sheets but that), and old man Selleck, trapped in a loveless marriage (with Wendie Malick weirdly underused as his wife), makes repeated passes on (and gets repeated rejections from) salesman Brent.

Jeremy Piven is the weak link in the cast. Piven is an overhyped actor in my opinion — you can give him funny lines to say, but his personality and delivery rarely add anything to the comedy. He comes off as annoying most of the time, he doesn’t look or dress anything like a real salesman (even the cheesy jackets and novelty ties on the other salesmen look better than he does), and he lacks the charisma to pull off a leading role, especially with a romantic subplot. He’s supposed to be a real tale-spinner of a salesman, but his two big monologues — in an early scene on a plane, and later at the film’s climax — both come off as overwritten and cartoonishly unbelievable. In fact, the implausibility of the plane scene serves as a signal that this film will not be aiming for realism, so turn off the logic centers of your brain and just roll with the comedy.

This movie generally works best and provides the most laughs when the camera points away from Piven to the more entertaining supporting cast. Hahn is hilarious as the oversexed Babs, especially in a great scene where she makes a car sale through verbal seduction. It’s fun to watch Ving Rhames playing a comedic role for a change, and he’s very funny. Likewise, seeing lantern-jawed, usually serious character actor Charles Napier doing comedy as a crotchety veteran salesman is another highlight here. (He’s previously well known as the Memphis cop beaten to death with a nightstick by Hannibal Lecter in The Silence Of The Lambs.) Craig Robinson (warehouse foreman Darrell on The Office) has some fun playing a VERY single-minded DJ. And James Brolin seems to be having so much fun wearing polyester clothes and playing bisexual that he can barely keep a smile off his face for the entire movie.

That’s a redeeming factor about The Goods — despite the tedium of Jeremy Piven’s acting, the thin-as-paper plot, and the welcome but sadly underused presence of talented cast members like Wendie Malick, Tony Hale (Buster Bluth from Arrested Development), and Ken Jeong, it seems like much of the cast had fun making the movie; one can sense that watching it, and that sense of fun adds to the audience’s enjoyment. So do the laugh lines, which are of sufficient quantity here, including several surprisingly funny appearances by a certain 12-letter maternally oriented expletive (hearing it sung with harmony in one instance). The movie isn’t as good as the 1980 Robert Zemeckis comedy Used Cars starring Kurt Russell, but then, not every car is a classic, is it. Yeah, The Goods has its problems and runs kind of choppy, but it’s still a better ride than that clunker Adam Sandler’s currently selling down the block.