Go
Directed by Doug Liman Starring Sarah Polley, Desmond Askew, Taye Diggs
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Go
Here's my question: What's a nice girl like Sarah Polley doing in a mess
like Doug Liman's new film"Go?" Polley, whose ethereal beauty and open
heart were the strongest and most moving things in "The Sweet
Hereafter," somehow manages to keep her head above water in this
derivative, overblown and underthought homage to "Pulp Fiction."
For the record, "Go" is three interlinked tales that, like Tarantino's,
begin and end in the middle, with excursions both fore and aft. Polley
is Ronna, a Los Angeles supermarket clerk in desperate need of rent
money, who takes on a drug deal for an English coworker, Simon (played
by Desmond Askew, who reads his lines with the dogged determination of
someone who's never seen a script before but doesn't want to let that
stop him). Askew and three friends, meanwhile, are on their way to Las
Vegas for a weekend of fun and games, which end up involving a torched
hotel bedroom, a car chase, a bullet wound, and a fair amount of vomit.
Of the gang of four, only Taye Diggs, as Marcus, the black member, has
any kind of screen presence, and two of the film's few witty moments
involve whites at the Las Vegas casino treating him like a) a men's room
attendant, and b) a car-park valet.
We leave them on their way back to L.A. and pick up yet a third group,
this time a pair of entrapped gay lovers who are forced by a detective
to wear a wire into the supermarket and make that drug deal with Simon
-- the deal that Ronna takes on in order to get the rent money. Since
the whole deal involves just twenty tabs of Ecstasy, the inventive
Ronna, sensing she's trapped by the wired guys and their bizarre police
master, dumps the drug, replaces it with hits of allergy medicine and
baby aspirin, and makes a killing at a local rave from all the stoned
participants.
If the film had just stayed with Ronna and her adventures in drugland it
might have had at least a bit of the charm of the Travolta-Thurman
segment of "Pulp Fiction." As it is, there are a few nice moments,
involving her friend and driver Timothy Olyphant, who helps himself to a
couple of tabs while driving Ronna around, and then undergoes two
transforming experiences -- the first is a wild macarena dance at the
supermarket, and the second is a confrontation with a mind-reading black
cat. But all the wit is lost in the endless screeching of wheels, the
weakly-written dialogue, and the poor acting.
The film was written by John August and directed (and shot) by Doug
Liman, whose first film, "Swingers," of a couple of years ago was an
indie favorite. I've always subscribed to the theory of the sophomore
jinx, which says that one's second effort -- second year in baseball,
second novel, second whatever -- is in most cases going to be weaker
than the first, but that the third effort will be sublime; it's kind of
a Marxist dialectic, or a thesis-antithesis-synthesis view. In this
case, though, I'll make an exception.
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