*** (out of ****)
Starring Sarah Polley, Desmond Askew, Taye Diggs, Katie Holmes, William Fichtner, Scott Wolf, Jay Mohr, and Timothy Olyphant.
Directed by Doug Liman & written by John August
1999 R
“Go” is “Pulp Fiction” recast with college drop-outs, for people who drink, dance, party, get paid by the hour, routinely fight with their parents, and think it’s cool to know drug dealers even if they don’t do drugs themselves. “Go” lacks the moral stance of “Pulp Fiction,” which was about redemption and, dare-I-say, the grace of God. “Go” has no moral stance. It is only interested in copying “Pulp Fiction’s” surface, and as such shares “Pulp Fiction’s” ultra-talkative characters and overlapping, non-chronological story lines. It also shares “Fiction’s” assemblage of drug dealers, gangsters, and shiny handguns. But everyone in “Go” is younger, hipper, and more coiffed; instead of “Pulp Fiction’s” goofy-looking crew, everyone in “Go” looks ready for a magazine cover. Their conversations aren’t as good as those in “Pulp Fiction,” and some of them are so derivative as to be downright awkward. But “Go” is still a worthy and entertaining movie; it’s slick, energetic, and well-made, with an engaging series of stories and well-defined characters. Think of it as a Roman copy of a Greek original.
“Go” tells multiple interlocking stories over a period of a night and a day: first there’s Sarah Polley, who works at a grocery store and owes on rent. She hatches a plan to “borrow” some drugs from an ominous local dealer (Timothy Olyphant), sell them that night for their face value plus her rent, then pay the dealer later in the evening. As collateral, she leaves her more innocent friend (Katie Holmes) to sit in the drug dealer’s living room for a few hours. This being a movie, things go wrong.
Next there are two soap opera stars (Jay Mohr and Scott Wolf) caught with narcotics and being used by a laid-back vice cop (William Fichtner) to set up a sting. This leads to some odd lifestyle revelations about the three of them, as well as the cop’s wife. And last are the two friends (Desmond Askew, who works with Polley at the grocery store, and Taye Diggs) who set off for a weekend in Las Vegas but can’t stay out of trouble because Askew is simply too impulsive. Before they know it, they’ve set fire to a hotel room, shot a bouncer at a strip club, and mobsters are after them. All three storylines collide, sometimes plausibly, sometimes by massive coincidence.
The cast is uniformly solid and the characters have clear motivations and are sharply-drawn, even if they’re all despicable in one way or another. Doug Liman’s (“Swingers”) direction is energetic, characterized by loud pop music and frequent edits. While I don’t usually enjoy this style, it is appropriate for a movie about young people who have trouble holding still. My reservations about “Go” are more moral than aesthetic. My only aesthetic objection is that, well, it’s clearly cashing in on the “Pulp Fiction” craze as opposed to striking out into its own territory. My moral complaint is that the selfishness of these people began to wear on me. At the end of “Pulp Fiction,” Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis come to newer if incomplete realizations of their relationships with others. At the end of “Go,” no one seems changed at all, except they now have the sensation of “I got away with it.” It’s not surprising that one character extols that world peace can be achieved not through kindness toward others but through better sex.
Finished February 5, 2002.
Copyright 2002 Friday & Saturday Night