The Goods set to irritate car dealers

Auto dealers take a beating--again--in The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, a movie that opens on Aug. 14. Whether they will be outraged or merely annoyed will depend on their sense of humor.

You've probably seen the commercials: “Blind man, I don't know how you found your way onto this lot, but you aren't leaving without a car!”

Actually, that clip didn't make it into the final edit, possibly as the lone nod here to political correctness.

The Goods stars Jeremy Piven (of TV's Entourage) in his first lead film role, as Don Ready, who leads a team of four “mercenaries” who tour the country, hired by struggling auto dealers to turn around the business by any means necessary. Ready gets a call from Ben Selleck (James Brolin, as you've never seen him), owner of sagging Selleck Motors in Temecula, Calif., who needs a big Fourth of July weekend--211 cars sold in three days--or he'll lose the store.

Enter Ready and his team, Jibby (Ving Rhames), money man Gage (David Koechner), and redheaded Babs (Kathryn Hahn of TV's Crossing Jordan), who introduces herself to the sales staff like this: “I'm Babs, and yes, the carpet matches the drapes!”

The team's job is to turn the Selleck Motors sales staff into a corporate selling machine. Gage, for instance, walks into the finance manager's office and rips up his desktop photo of his two chubby children, replacing them with a photo of two rail-thin, hungry-looking kids. The finance manager points to the photo of his overweight, angry-looking wife. “She's fine," says Gage. "Customers will pity you for having to live with that.”

Ready boasts that he has never lost a sale to bad credit--he once sold M.C. Hammer a car, after the rapper had gone bankrupt “and was living in one leg of his big M.C. Hammer pants.” He recruits a DJ and several dancers from the local strip club and even lines up a near-celebrity for the big weekend--the apparently fictional Eric Bice, brother of American Idol loser Bo Bice.

If you think of how Talladega Nights treated NASCAR, you‘ll get a good idea of how The Goods treats car dealers, not surprising since a lot of people involved with Talladega Nights show up here, including Will Ferrell, both as a producer and in a pivotal, and arguably hilarious, cameo role. And if it sounds a little like the 1980 Kurt Russell-Jack Warden film Used Cars, it is, but it's far more profane and raunchy.

The Goods starts out like gangbusters but fades near the end, as a depressed Ready simply wanders off into the desert, and the movie sort of wanders off with him. Ready returns, and Selleck Motors survives. Overall, The Goods works as Piven's Big Chance, if you think of him as perhaps the next Michael Keaton.

There's no arguing, though, that The Goods doesn't do cars dealers any favors--but what movie ever has?

By Steven Cole Smith