The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard   Starring: Jeremy Piven, Ving Rhames, James Brolin and David Koechner Pathé Distribution RRP: £15.99 P926001000 Certificate: 15 Available 22 February 2010

When Ben Selleck’s car lot runs into financial trouble he calls in a group of maverick salesmen, led by Don Ready, who guarantee to make the fourth of July weekend a bumper sale, only things do not go quite as planned....

The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard (2009 - 1 hr, 25 min, 32 sec) is a comedy from director Neal Brennan, who is probably better known as the writer of the Chappelle's Show, so you pretty much know that the film will be irreverent and refuse to take prisoners. The film was written by Andy Stock and Rick Stempson.

The movie follows the exploits of Ready (Jeremy Piven) and his motley crew of super sales persons, which includes an over sexed vixen, Babs (Kathryn Hahn), who spends much of the film trying to have sex with Selleck’s ten year old son who is trapped in a thirty-one year old body; Jibby (Ving Rhames), who has f**ked a lot of women but lives in regret that he has yet to make love to one; and Brent (David Koechner) who spends his time as the homosexual love interest of the lot's owner Ben Selleck (James Brolin). Anyone offended or upset yet? No, well we will carry on.

Add a subplot of Ready falling in love and mistaking one of the other lot's salesmen as his long lost son and what we have here is a comedy which has never heard of the concept of political correctness. Ben Selleck also has a complicated life as his daughter Ivy (Jordana Spiro) is engaged to the moronic Paxton Harding (Ed Helms), who is not only the son of his greatest rival, Stu Harding (Alan Thicke), but also a singer in an aging and unsuccessful boy band.

Selleck’s sales force isn’t much better consisting of Teddy Dang (Ken Jeong), who is beaten up during a hate crime when the others mistakenly think he is Japanese and attack him in revenge for Pearl Harbour, even though it turns out that he is Korean. One of the standout characters/freaks is Dick Lewiston (Charles Napier) a racist, coke snorting, madman who is as likely to attack you as sell you a car, for me his character stole the show. Behind this hangs the tragic fate of Ready’s deceased partner, with an unaccredited appearance by Will Ferrell who also acted as co producer, who always knew that he would die sky diving, without a parachute but with a purple dildo in his hand.

This is probably not the greatest comedy that you will ever see but the team have made sure that the jokes come thick and fast so if you don’t like the current one there will be another along in a few minutes. The comedy ranges from the crudely absurd, to frankly the crudely absurd, the writers and director hold no prisoners and just about every creed, colour and sexual predilection is used and abused. The cast is pretty good and rarely fall out of character, but then in a film like this who cares? It’s not exactly Shakespeare.

The disc is a pretty bare bones affair; you get English subtitles and the original theatrical trailer. The picture is okay, but not great, and the 5.1 audio track is adequate. For once these things are less important as you’ll be watching this for laughs.

As a finished product this is really down to personal taste. There is much here to amuse and offend. Ultimately, the film isn’t as clever nor as funny as it thinks it is, but it should make a pretty good film to watch with a couple of beers.

6

Charles Packer