We caught up with The Goods: Live Hard. Sell Hard, a 2009 comedy we had not heard of, but caught our eye in a charity shop, especially as from the ‘guys’ behind Talladega Nights and Step Brothers, both of which we found amusing.
I would say if you are not a fan of those 2 movies, this probably won’t be for you!
The film centres on Don Ready (Jeremy Piven) who is a master salesman of used cars, with no roots or home to call his own, he spends his entire life living from hotel to hotel, turning car dealership sales around and partying heavily with his 3 man team: Jibby (Ving Rhames); Brent (David Koechner) and Babs (Kathryn Hayn)
His life will change completely when he is asked to help an ailing car dealership run by Ben Selleck (James Brolin) from his former hometown.
Selleck needs Don and his team to sell 211 cars over the 4th of July weekend or else he will have to go out of business.
Not sure if Don can achieve this, he looks to accept an offer from Stu Harding (Alan Thicke) his main rival, who wants to buy the lot for his son, Paxton (Ed Helms) who wants to use it as a practice space for his ‘man’ band Big Ups!
Don stops the sale, agreeing that Ben will sell the plot if he doesn’t sell all 211 cars. Now Don wants to do this more than any other sale in his life as he has fallen for Ben’s daughter and Paxton’s future wife, Ivy (Jordana Spiro)
Most of his team are also finding love too, Jibby believes he has found the one in a stripper called Heather (Noureen DeWulf) Babs has gotten herself obsessed with the Selleck’s boy trapped in a man’s body son, Peter (Rob Riggle) and Brent’s love interest is unwanted, as it’s from Ben Selleck!
Don takes Ben’s poor sales team that includes Wade (Tony Hale); Teddy (Ken Jeong); Dick (Charles Napier) and Blake (Jonathan Sadowski) who may or may not be Don’s son from a fling many years ago.
With a cast like this, plenty of laughs come thick and fast, with added cameos from Will Ferrell as Don’s former best friend; Kristen Schaal in a memorable aeroplane party/hijack and Craig Robinson as the DJ who does not do requests!
Amongst a lot of the crude comedy, the film has a lot of heart as Don learns about himself and allowing people into his life. We were surprised at how much fun we had watching this film from writers Andy Stock and Rick Stempson, who also wrote Gary The Tennis Coach, starring Sean William Scott. The film was directed by Neal Brennan.
If you want to find out if Don sells all the cars (including one that was from Smokey and the Bandit) and if his team all have happy endings, as well as find out if Big Ups are the next big band, you could do a lot worse than give the Goods a watch.
Have you seen the Goods? Have you found an unexpected find in a charity shop? We would love to hear from you.
You can watch the Goods trailer here:
You can find the film at Amazon here:
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