Go (1999)

reviewed by
Bill Chambers


GO *** (out of four) -a review by Bill Chambers ( go@filmfreakcentral.net )

starring Sarah Polley, Desmond Askew, Jay Mohr, Scott Wolf screenplay by John August directed by Doug Liman

Go's is a gloriously slick hip machine. Director Liman (who also photographed Go) and screenwriter August celebrate the drug/rave scene in L.A., preferring to take (comedic) snapshots of troubled youth rather than critique them. After more than ninety minutes of pill-popping, tantric sex, car chases, and attempted murder, Go even has a happy ending. This is the sort of film that gives members of the Dove Foundation splitting headaches; as Go wound down, I anticipated an anti-pill-popping-casual-tantric-sex-car-chase-attempted-murder sermon that (blessedly) didn't arrive.

A la Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Go is comprised of three separate but related stories. The basics are as follows: Ronna (Polley) is a bitter grocery store clerk facing eviction who turns to drug dealing for extra dough. Her co-worker, Simon (the improbably named Askew), is a clubber from Britain ecstatic about his first trip to Vegas. Zack (Mohr) and Adam (Wolf) are soap opera stars escaping a career-threatening conviction by assisting a peculiar cop (Fichtner) in a drug bust. Perhaps because the innovative structure of Tarantino's non-linear masterwork is by now old hat, the id-fueled Go delighted me but rarely surprised me (with the exception of that mind-reading cat!); Pulp Fiction zigzagged down roads unforeseen, but we see Go's wheels turning from its first flash frame to the last.

Torontonian Polley (of The Sweet Hereafter) refused to do publicity for this picture on the basis that she was "not pleased with" her turn as the ill-fated cashier. In Go, she delivers, hands-down, her best performance to date. Here's an (overrated) actress who agreed to appear on the poster, but not support her team at the junket or in interviews; this sort of arrogance is commonplace for Ms. Polley, as anyone who has read of her political agenda in the Canadian press will tell you. If she doesn't want to be the ingenue of the moment, she should have said "No," not Go.

But I digress. Go is a fun film, so chipperly depraved one can't help but turn off his moral judgment for its duration and enjoy the ride. In that sense, it's a departure from Liman's last film, Swingers, which at least lectured against self-absorption in the form of Vince Vaughan's Trent and his subtle comeuppance in the story's clever epilogue (which has been aped by McDonald's for their latest commercial). I wish I cared more about Go's characters: like the techno music they listen to, the bands of anarchists on display here are at once absorbing and vacuous. When the lights came up and stung my eyes, it was difficult to recall what about it entertained me.

Yet entertain me it did. Go is light and frothy, featuring compelling if not endearing work by Polley, Timothy Olyphant (Scream 2), and especially Fichtner, whose homoerotic behavior is milked for effective laughs. Fichtner is a character actor best known for playing backstabbers (in Heat, Armageddon, and others); his previously untapped comic abilities shine in Go. Unlike much of the film, Fichtner is unpredictable.

                                     -April, 1999
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