The Irish Times - Friday, October 23, 2009

ELSEWHERE IN these pages, this writer muses upon the rights and wrongs of revealing key plot details in a review.

You'd think that nobody could object to a critic describing incidents that occur in the first 45 seconds of a film, but you obviously haven't seen The Goods. 

The opening minute of this broad comedy isn't too bad. There are three good jokes and a passably amenable atmosphere is established.

Here's the strategy. If you have one of those multiplexes passes, make your way into the cinema and stay until the Asian bloke from The Hangover gets dye sprayed in his face. Then leave. It's probably not worth your while sitting down.

The remaining hour and 28 minutes are, alas, as appalling as anything else you will witness this year. Featuring the sort of acting you'd expect to see in a Northern Irish sitcom, The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard once again demonstrates that bad taste is only excusable when packaged in genuinely amusing gag-wrap.

The film stars Jeremy Piven as the leader of a group of adept car salesmen called in to save a dealership from bankruptcy. They hustle in unamusing ways. They show contempt for the clients. In short, the film is Glengarry Glen Ross written by baboons. One hopes the script was improvised. Otherwise no reasonable excuse can be imagined for the haphazard plotting, deranged motivations and hurtling, unattached punchlines.

There is, it is true, something a little like a plot in here. But it is the plot of an average episode of Mork and Mindy : idiot does bad things, idiot learns lesson, idiot undergoes mild transformation. The goods? The bads, more like.

Ha ha! Do you see what I did there?