The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard (review)

It’s possible that this appallingly awful excuse for a raunchy comedy is meant to be satirical, but I suspect it’s merely shockingly incompetent, even grading on the raunchy-comedy curve. Not that it would have worked as satire, either, but the notion makes it slightly easier to explain away what appears to be the concept here: If only we were all as rude, crude, lewd, and selfish as super car salesman Don Ready (Jeremy Piven [RocknRolla], who looks embarrassed to be here, as well he should), America would be great again. Or else it’s the sleazy bigotry and uncontrollable horniness of America that has always made the nation great; the scrawlers of the “script” (Andy Stock and Rick Stempson, who actually put their names to their only previous produced work, the direct-to-DVD Balls Out: Gary the Tennis Coach) don’t seem to know what they want to say, except that any scene that can conceivably be set in a strip club while near-naked women shake their asses in the protagonists’ faces, should be so set. Over one Fourth of July weekend, Ready and his team of morons will engage in a lying, cheating race to the bottom in order to sell every car on a Temecula, California, lot, and the screenwriters and director Neal Brennan (TV’s Chappelle’s Show) will engage in a race to the bottom to see who can be more disgusting. Will Stock and Stempson win, with their invention of a 10-year-old with a hormonal problem who looks like a grown man (played by Rob Riggle [The Hangover], whom we must surely pity) and the car-selling broad (Kathryn Hahn: Step Brothers) who makes every attempt possible to sexually molest him? Or will it be Brennan, who smears a reeking musk of desperation all over his movie, in the hopes that you will laugh at anything, or at least not leave the theater with a desire to strangle him to prevent him from committing more cinema?