Jeremy Piven stars in a raucous comedy produced by Will Ferrell who also makes a cameo. Will Ferrell involved in a raucous comedy?! What won’t they think of next? Some sort of telephony device enabling you to talk to people who aren’t in the same room as you?
This is a film for people with simple expectations from comedies, like boobs, but unlike last year’s Sexdrive which turned out far funnier and subversive than it had any right to be this is a comedy which makes tasteless jokes without being hilarious or subverting stereotypes. Piven is obviously having the time of his life in the lead role of Don Ready, whose business card reads “I move cars mother****er”. Ready is the ultimate smooth-talking used-car salesman, whose speech about smoking on planes as an act of patriotism earns the applause of all the passengers before he turns the flight into the Zoo Plane from Bill Murray’s Hunter S Thompson film Where the Buffalo Roam. His associates are Ving Rhames and Anchorman stalwarts David Koechner and Kathryn Hahn. It is Ferrell’s cronies who raise concerns… Ready pimps out Brent Gage (Koechner) to the bi-curious Ben Selleck (James Brolin), owner of the car-dealership Ready is in town to save, leading to endless homophobic jokes. Meanwhile Hahn’s pouting redhead Babs Merrick spends the film lusting after a 10 year old boy who she tries to get drunk so she can ‘wrestle’ with him. The boy in question looks 30, thanks to a ‘hilarious’ medical condition (pituitary gland disorder), but acts 10. Still, obviously a comedic idea conceived before Roman Polanski got arrested.
There are good moments dotted throughout the film. There is a nice gag about the three types of girls who become strippers, Ready displays an admirable disregard for logic in his quest for a new woman and his long-lost son, and Charles Napier (Austin Powers’ General Hawk) has a number of godlike sequences including inciting a riot, and assaulting a Korean salesman in revenge for Pearl Harbour after Ready makes a speech about how their mission to save the dealership by selling the entire stock over the 4th of July weekend is the apotheosis of patriotism. Will Ferrell’s cameo is as bizarre and unfunny as his brief appearances in Starsky & Hutch and Wedding Crashers but even so he does deliver the line “Oh Christ, that dildo’s back” wonderfully well.
Piven is a talented comedy performer and he carries this film well. Director Neal Brennan has worked with Dave Chappelle but screenwriters Andy Stock and Rick Stempson are newcomers and they do not impress. This raises enough laughs in its incredibly short running time of just about 82 minutes if you’re looking for undemanding viewing on a drunken night in, but, just as its faithful adherence to clichés of comedy films make it feel longer than it is, the laughs that it raises are from profane outrageousness rather than genuine wit and will leave a nasty taste in the mouth afterwards.
2/5
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