The Goods (2009)

Stars: Jeremy Piven and James Brolin

Director: Neal Brennan

Plugs: Arby’s, Pepsi, Toyota

In the new comedy The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, Jeremy Piven stars as Don Ready, a shady, fast-talking, go-getting car salesman extraordinaire. He’s the type who can sell ice to Eskimos and inspire his crew (David Koechner, Ving Rhames and Kathryn Hahn) to do the same. He’s quick with a quip and good with the ladies—in particular the daughter of Ben Selleck (James Brolin), a man who hires Don to revive his faltering Temecula, California, car dealership.

The film demonstrates Ready’s allegedly amazing gift of gab early on, when he starts to light up a cigarette on an airplane. He is of course immediately chastised by a flight attendant, but responds with a rousing, jingoistic speech about his right to light up in the land of the free. Cut to a flying party in the sky where the crew and passengers are smoking and drinking.

There’s something inherently interesting about desperate salespeople, whether the sad sacks in Glengarry Glen Ross, or the con men in the 1980 film Used Cars. With salesmen, the conflict is inherent in the character: either they can make the sale (or quota) or they can’t. Ready and his crew do everything they can to sell Selleck’s cars ahead of a buyout from a rival car dealer, played by Alan Thicke. It’s up to Ready to save the day by selling every last car off the lot by the weekend. Can he do it? Of course, that goal is secondary to the avalanche of jokes (some racy, some stupid, some raunchy) that ensues.

The film’s pace (and therefore comedy quotient) slows down when the writers shoehorned in a love story involving Ready’s implausible desire to give up the road life and settle down—after all, there must be a character arc. Will Ferrell, whose appearance in films has been scientifically proven to have a deadening effect on comedy, shows up in a cameo appearance carefully edited for length to avoid Ferrell fatigue.

The Goods often comes off less as a complete, considered movie than as a series of comedy sketches loosely strung together. To be sure, a lot of the jokes and situations carry their comedic weight. The film has many, many supporting characters—most of them played by seasoned comedy actors with a great sense of timing—who provide a few funny lines. The Goods is hardly comedy gold, though coming as it does from folks who brought you Old School and Stepbrothers, is better than you might expect.