For the most part, a movie like Go had the unfortunate timing of appearing in theaters less than five years after Quentin Tarantino’s breakthrough hit, Pulp Fiction, along with quite a few disappointing imitators. But to compare the two movies is like comparing The Deer Hunter to Full Metal Jacket.
Both Go and Pulp Fiction are about low-lifes in Los Angeles’ underworld. But Pulp Fiction is about redemption and salvation. Go, directed by Doug Liman after the sleeper hit Swingers, is just a a wild ride about being young at a time when pop culture was changing in real time before our eyes. The characters are engaged in one way or another with drug selling, buying or possession.
Presumably, the events take place over a 24-hour period in the L.A. suburbs and the Las Vegas strip at an undetermined time before Christmas Day. The movie revolves around four co-workers at a supermarket and their wild adventures. Simon Baines (Desmond Askew) is a Brit who also sells ecstasy on the side from a dealer, Todd Gaines (Timothy Olyphant). However, he wants to go to Las Vegas with his friends, Marcus (Taye Diggs), Tiny (Breckin Meyer), and Singh (James Duval) but is scheduled to work.
He pays the teenage Ronna (Sarah Polley) some money to pick up his shift as she’s about to get evicted. And Ronna is approached by two young soap opera actors Adam (Scott Wolf) and Zack (Jay Mohr) to buy drugs. Ronna and her co-workers/friends Claire Montgomery (Katie Holmes) and Manny (Nathan Bexton) go over to Todd’s apartment. But Todd isn’t too willing to help as Ronna doesn’t have enough money so Claire stays as collateral.
From there, things turn worse as Ronna suspects an older man, Burke Halverson (William Fichtner), at Adam and Zack’s place may be with the police and flushes them down the toilet before she leaves. It turns out Burke is a narcotics officer and Adam and Zack were busted for possession so Adam wears a wire so they can acquire pills from Simon. However, since he’s away in Las Vegas, they get Ronna to do it but she replaces the ecstasy pills with allergy/sinus pills and has gone to a rave to sell them under the guise of ecstasy.
In Las Vegas, Simon and Marcus go gambling while Tiny and Singh get food poisoning from the shrimp at the buffets and stay in the room with diarrhea. Because he’s black, Marcus is constantly confused with being a bathroom attendant and a parking valet. So when he is given keys to a Ferrari convertible, they go to a strip club, where things go wrong there leaving the four friends to flee the city. They are chased by the club proprietors through the streets.
Back in L.A. Adam and Zack find themselves being talked into spending the evening with Burke and his wife, Irene (Jane Krakowski), who is also a police officer. Burke and Irene both have to work on Christmas so they’re doing their dinner that night. Almost immediately, Adam and Zack think the Halverson have something kinky in mind but they actually want something no one would suspect.
Yet, they also find themselves at the rave where Todd has gone in search of Ronna after discovering she switched the pills. To make matters worse, Manny has taken two ecstasy pills without realizing their full potency and constantly freaks out as he hallucinates Todd’s cat is talking to him and the cashier at the drug store dances with him to a version of “La Macarena.”
Just because the movie revolves around drug-dealing and Vegas doesn’t draw a comparison rightfully to Pulp Fiction because Tarantino wasn’t the first filmmaker to have interconnected stories making up a movie and he sure won’t be the last. Robert Altman basically did it with Nashville back when Tarantino was still in grade school. And no one says the same thing about 11:14 which follows the same format. And Jim Jarmusch had about five years on Tarantino with his movie Mystery Train.
There were a lot of neo-noir crime movies that arose in the aftermath of Fiction. But I would compare Go more to a version of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours where doing something that can be so simple results into multiple obstacles. It’s also not as violent as many of the imitators in the 1990s. Not to give too much away but only one person is shot by accident, in the arm, not the face and another person is accidentally hit by a car but survives.
The intention of Liman and writer John August is not to copy Tarantino but to do a story about America’s youth at a certain point in time that will never happen again. The youngsters don’t have cellphones but pagers, which adds to the story. A few years later, just about everyone would’ve had a Nokia phone and they would’ve avoided some of the issues here.
I was never into the whole rave scene even though I was around the same age range as the characters. Even though I don’t really care for it, a lot of people like Dazed and Confused which was released in 1993. I’d like to think of this as an Xennial version of that movie as partying and doing drugs was more important than drinking beer and cruising was in Dazed.
The characters in the movie aren’t exactly that bad, but they’re not exactly angels. Simon gets his comeuppance but for the most part, everything works out well for everyone. They learn their lessons or decide that they need to change their ways before it’s too late. Yet, it doesn’t dwell on it as much as Pulp Fiction.
And just like other movies, it features many young actors before they got bigger. Meyer said many of the young actors in the movie as well as rest of Hollywood was eager to be in the movie. Wolf said there was a lot of talk about it as the movie was being cast.
Olyphant became available after he was fired from Practical Magic and was called in to audition for Adam and Zack but everyone decided he was better as Todd, which is the role Olyphant had wanted to play. He had previously played the killer in Scream 2. However, Olyphant gives the impression Todd is more talk than he is action and gives more insight to his character when he tells Claire about why he doesn’t like The Family Circus.
Even Fichtner as Burke gives off the initial impression he’s corrupt or dangerous, mostly because Fichtner had plays heavies and baddies up until now. But seeing him with Krakowski seems odd until they let Adam and Zack on with their intentions of inviting them to dinner. And upon first seeing Adam and Zack in the store, Claire makes a comment about them that seems like a joke but is later proven to be real.
And there’s a short one scene by Melissa McCarthy in her first film role as Sandra, the roommate of a make-up artist who works with Adam and Zack.
But most impressive is how Liman proves he can tackle bigger productions after Swingers, which reportedly only cost $250,000 to make. Liman would go on to make the impressive spy action thriller The Bourne Identity, also set at Christmastime. He would go on later to work with Tom Cruise on Edge of Tomorrow and American Made. Some people may not like car chase scenes but as the sequence during the Vegas story is very well for practical effects.
If this isn’t already part of your Christmas holiday viewing, check it out and you’ll probably include it next year and every year after that.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 