The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard

I love the movie Used Cars.  It is one of the funniest movies from start to finish that I have ever seen.  Once I realized that The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard was also about used car salesmen, I knew it had a huge measuring stick to go up against.  The Goods focuses on one particular type of used car salesman; the ones that car lots bring in when they really need to make a lot of sales.  John Landis did a fantastic documentary on one of these used car warriors called Slasher.  It was a very entertaining film and it showed some of the tricks of the trade.  The Goods didn’t use all the tricks that Slasher used like the $50 car that is for the most part a piece of junk the dealer should be paying to have hauled away, but they created some that were funny and yet plausible like the salesman that buys the customer’s car as a trade-in and then sells it back to him at a mark-up 40 minutes later.

One of the reasons I felt The Goods worked so well was its top-notch cast.  Jeremy Piven, Ving Rhames, David Koechner, and Kathryn Hahn are the sales crew brought in to bring up the sales.  The local crew they are brought in to assist includes Tony Hale, Ken Jeong, and Charles Napier.  We also meet the family that owns the lot led by patriarch Ben Selleck, played by James Brolin.  The rest of the family includes Wendie Malick, Rob Riggle, and Jordana Spiro.  Spiro plays daughter Ivy Selleck who is engaged to Paxton Harding (Ed Helms) the son of a competing used car dealer played by Alan Thicke.  Helping to further raise the comedy talent quotient is Craig Robinson as DJ Request (a DJ that refuses to take requests) and an unbilled Will Ferrell as McDermott, the sales team’s former DJ who dies in a horrible sky diving accident that had me laughing out loud sitting by myself in the living room.

The plot is pretty simple.  The mercenary sales force comes in and motivates the local crew.  They buy lots of TV and radio spots to promote the event and bring in a minor celebrity to help sell the event.  The rival dealer makes a play for the lot and they end up making a wager that they will sell every car on the lot by the end of the weekend.  It is the whacked out characters and their interactions that make the film.  Helms for example is also part of a boy band, or as he calls it, a man band since all the members are grown men.  Brolin has a crush on one of Piven’s sales crew but it isn’t the busty red-head, it’s Koechner.  Piven has his eyes on Spiro’s Ivy despite her engagement to Helms.  And Hahn has the hots for Brolin’s son Peter (Riggle) who although he is in a huge man size body is actually only 10 years old and suffers from a glandular disorder that makes him large.

The Goods is not as laugh packed as Used Cars, but it is still pure good old raunchy fun done extremely well.  I didn’t see the film when it was in theaters, and it appears that I was not alone in that.  The trailer and the marketing didn’t do a good enough job of telling the potential audience what they were in for.  That is terrible for audience attendance, but it makes the film that much more enjoyable when you can walk in and no practically nothing about the film.

I give The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard 4 stars.  Any flaws it has I can overlook by the virtue of two incredibly funny scenes that had me laughing.  I mentioned that one was the skydiving scene.  The other one also involves Ferrell, but this time with a pair of singing black angels with dirty mouths.  Definitely check this movie out, and if you see Used Cars available, make it a double feature.