GO (Columbia) Starring: Sarah Polley, Katie Holmes, Jay Mohr, Scott Wolf, Desmond Askew, Timothy Olyphant, Taye Diggs, William Fichtner. Screenplay: John August. Producers: Paul Rosenberg, Mickey Liddell and Matt Freeman. Director: Doug Liman. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, sexual situations, drug use, nudity, violence) Running Time: 98 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
In this cinematic era A.Q. (After Quentin), much film criticism is filtered through the pop-culture sieve that is Tarantino. We just can't seem to help ourselves -- when we're not noting ways Tarantino has cribbed from his film-making forebears, we're noting the ways his acolytes have cribbed from him. A gun can't be fired but his name is invoked; a conversation can't be peppered with profanity and obscure references but he becomes an adjective. When a film like GO appears, so like PULP FICTION in both narrative structure and style, it's easy to dismiss it on a comparative basis without discussing why the Tarantino oeuvre has become the Greenwich Mean Time for an entire genre -- the edgy, after-hours comic thriller. It's easy to miss why director Doug Liman's film works in the ways it understands Tarantino's unique touch, and doesn't work in the ways it fails to understand.
Like PULP FICTION, GO involves several non-chronological yet intertwined stories of Los Angeles denizens with less than glowing morals. Ronna (Sarah Polley), a young grocery store clerk, takes the shift of her co-worker Simon (Desmond Askew) to help pay back rent, then also takes some of Simon's side business as a drug dealer to help a bit more substantially. Her two customers are Zack (Jay Mohr) and Adam (Scott Wolf), a pair of party animals who may be undercover cops, or perhaps soap opera actors, or perhaps some interesting combination of the two. Simon, meanwhile, is on a road trip to Las Vegas with a trio of pals including Marcus (Taye Diggs), a road trip which always seems to be just one step ahead of complete disaster. These three stories meet, swerve and overlap through one wild 24-hour period filled with sex, drugs and a pre-Christmas rave.
There's something to be said for a film with the ability to grab you viscerally, which is one of the tricks GO manages to pull off. That description isn't just about pacing (though GO moves with the hypnotic momentum of a rave beat), nor is it just about the level of violence and action (though there's one kicker of a car chase through Vegas). Like the most memorable moments in PULP FICTION, the most memorable moments in GO energize you with the sense that you're really not sure what's going to happen next. At key junctures, you realize that screenwriter John August is in complete command of his narrative as he turns expectations upside down in ways that make perfect sense, not just because he can.
That's not to say that GO doesn't wander off on tangents just because they might prove to be entertaining. GO isn't a clean, linear story even in the most fundamental ways, but it's also a case of a film that doesn't let the main storyline get in the way of some hilarious distractions: Ronna's entrepreneurial spirit as she sells her own special brand of pills at the party; Zack and Adam at a Christmas dinner with ulterior motives; Simon experimenting with tantric sex with a pair of bridesmaids; the encyclopedic knowledge of a cat during a hallucinogenic trip. Like much of Tarantino's work, it's a loose and sloppy sort of a film, which doesn't mean that there's no logic to what's going on. It's just the logic of giving an audience one heck of a ride, letting the characters stroll and stray because the film-makers have created an atmosphere where we trust they'll stroll somewhere interesting.
Unlike much of Tarantino's work, however, there's not much going on beneath the glittering surface of GO. The closest it gets to a thematic link is the idea that these young people dash into dangerous situations with little restraint on their desire to...well, to go. There's nothing resembling the moral center of PULP FICTION, nor do August and Liman show nearly as much affection for their flawed, self-absorbed characters. The performances are solid even when the chattery dialogue feels a bit forced, giving us plenty of reason to follow the characters even when they seem like hopeless screw-ups, but no one is experiencing a fundamental life change. GO is a dazzling demonstration of how good even a derivative sort of film can be when someone grasps the basic principles of engrossing film-making. It also demonstrates what we talk about when we talk about Tarantino -- a way of telling us something about humanity between the bursts of dialogue and gunfire.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 green lights: 8.
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