The film begins chronicling the ridiculous adventures of Ronna (Sarah
Polley), an 18 year-old supermarket clerk on the verge of being evicted.
She gets involved in a drug deal gone bad, walking into a bust and having
to flush her stash. Unable to pay her supplier, she sells cold medicine as
ecstasy to 15 year-olds at a rave. The film then swerves away from L.A. to
follow the exploits of another supermarket employee, Simon (Desmond Askew),
as he and his "best mates" live it up in Las Vegas. This sequence
quickly spirals downward through a celluloid blender of gratuitous sex and
violence, ending up with the group fleeing back to L.A. The final plot
sequence involves a pair of TV cops (Jay Mohr and Scott Wolf) who, to cop a
deal for their own crime, try to entrap Ronna into selling to them.
Go draws heavily from the Tarantino tradition of low-life,
high-octane filmmaking. The narrative construction of Go is
heavy-handedly inspired by 1994’s Pulp Fiction, with the plot
swinging backwards and sideways in time. The film’s protagonists
represent various aspects of an underworld that could exist only in
Hollywood. They're beautiful, dazzling, hip and ultimately pathetic
cardboard cutouts who pander to a narcissistic middle class adolescence
that's grown up on a steady diet of Mountain Dew commercials.
This amalgamation of beautiful people, arty narrative construction and
stylishly "criminal" subject matter probably looked great on paper. As a
concept, this film seems to have all the ingredients necessary to wow both
the aging Gen Xers and their younger adolescent siblings. Unfortunately, as
anything more than eye candy, Go falls flat in a spectacularly
universal manner.
The key to Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs' success was
that the viewer to some extent cared about the characters. The protagonists
were in seedy circumstances and had questionable morals, but they came
across as human beings. Liman and screenwriter John August fail miserably
in bringing any sense of humanity to Go’s rag-tag crew of characters.
Despite the across-the-board staleness of the performances and
relationships found in Go, there are some bits of entertainment and
humanity that shine through. A few of the actors transcend the stifling
atmosphere of the film to turn in legitimately entertaining performances.
Taye Diggs, as Simon’s friend Marcus, portrays his character as
decidedly not vile despite the ridiculous situations in which he is
involved. Todd Gaines, "the beautiful drug dealer" (Timothy Olyphant),
doesn’t appear as mean–or consequently as one-dimensional–as
he could have. Also, there are moments of genuine hilarity scattered
throughout the inconsistent script. That the film overall is a quagmire of
unjustified situational hyperbole and that it wallows through the motions
of being innovative cinema perhaps makes these kernels of true humor all
that much more funny.
When films are made and marketed with the pretensions of being
groundbreaking or challenging, it’s disappointing when they don’t
deliver on either count. It’s extremely disappointing, however, when
they actually go in the other direction, steadfastly following the
conventions of traditional mass-market filmmaking. Go is 1999’s
first great example of such a two-faced, shallow film. It surely won’t
be the last.
— Jeremy Richards (richarje@msnotes.wustl.edu)
