Like a Frankenstein monster that can never quite find the strength to climb off the table, The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard is a lumbering creation stitched together from body parts of past comedies operating in a similarly sophomoric vein. A slapdash effort that celebrates the Idiotic Man-Child in all his various incarnations, it quickly becomes clear that the colon in the title isn't the only thing the movie has in common with the likes of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.
Jeremy Piven stars as Don Ready, a mercenary salesman called into action whenever a company has trouble moving its product. For this particular Fourth of July weekend, Don and his team -- the lovelorn Jibby (Ving Rhames), the horny Babs (Kathryn Hahn) and the fast-talking Brent (David Koechner) -- find themselves hired to help car dealer Ben Selleck (James Brolin) empty out his lot. For Ready, it's always just a job, but for once, he finds himself getting emotionally involved with one of the locals -- specifically, Selleck's daughter Ivy (Jordana Spiro), who's preparing to marry a dweeb (The Hangover's Ed Helms) into boy bands.
The Goods isn't quite as coarse as other recent films of its ilk, but it also isn't very funny, with the humor quotient never rising above a few mild-mannered chuckles. The film messes around with some decidedly non-PC content -- hate crimes, child molestation, the sight of James Brolin sporting a massive boner under his pants -- but it's too tepid to earn any points for either audacity, originality or offensiveness. As the squished cherry on top, there's also an unfunny cameo by an overexposed actor whose own movies are pretty unfunny. I won't spoil the, uh, surprise here, although it's clearly no surprise to see him also listed as one of the producers of this shrug-inducing comedy that will doubtless play a helluva lot better after four pizza slices and eight beers.
THE GOODS: LIVE HARD, SELL HARD
*1/2
DIRECTED BY Neal Brennan
STARS Jeremy Piven, Ving Rhames
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