‘The Goods’ – Hard Living. Hard Selling. Light Laughing.
The Goods is an ensemble film of the kind where every character is a cookie-cutter caricature designed to get very specific laughs, and even though they succeed some of the time, it soon becomes clear that at least half of the comedy in the movie is thin padding thrown in to cover up the thinness of the material itself. It’s overflowing with profanity and political incorrectness and sports not one single likable character, so it is basically an exercise in laughing at a lot of people being asses to each other and other people. But it at least is a curious combination of characters and the pace of the jokes and skits is fast enough so that the bad ones – and believe me, there are plenty of bad ones – don’t linger as long as they do in typical Will Ferrell material. Oh, and Will Ferrell does make an uncredited cameo.
So here’s the plot in 100 words or so – An aging car dealership owner named Ben Selleck hires a team of professional car salesmen to come in and boost sales during the 4th of July weekend and save his ailing dealership. Ron Ready is heading the team but falls for Selleck’s daughter, who is engaged to marry a boy-band performer and son of an import dealership owner who, surprise, wants to buy Selleck’s lot and turn it into a studio for his jerkoff son. The challenge is to sell every car on the lot by the end of the weekend or lose the dealership.
So basically, it’s Dodgeball with cars. The most obvious and thorough similarity is Paxton Harding (Ed Helms), a self-obsesssed daddy’s boy who provides the most immediate threat to the team because his father owns the successful nearby import dealership and because he’s a total douchebag. 
And in case his gloating isn’t enough, he’s also a member of a “man/boy band” named Big-Ups which exists, like much of the rest of the comedy, just to fill up some screen time. The rest of the cast are designed to interact with each other in funny ways but their couplings are a little too obvious and thus generally not all that funny.
The film revolves around a challenge to sell every car on the lot in a single weekend or give it up to the competition, and on Don’s budding relationship with Ivy, who’s character has all the depth of one of the strippers in Crank 2. She’s the good-girl daughter of Ben Selleck and is engaged to marry her father’s arch-enemy’s son, who has not a single redeeming value. Strange since she seems to be a nice girl. At any rate, she becomes Don’s real motivation on his path to spiritual redemption after a catastrophe that took place in Albequerque involving Will Ferrell and Gina Gershon. 
It’s all as predictable as can be and you couldn’t squeeze in another cuss word sideways, but it’s entertaining enough and there are a few good jokes that almost, but not quite, balance out the bad ones and the pointless ones.
In scanning the other movies that you have available to you at this particular moment, I’m only a little bit surprised to notice that about 80% out there are better than The Goods, but it might be good for a weekend DVD rental when your girlfriend isn’t around. Or if your girlfriend is around and you just want to torture her with a movie that she’ll hate. And ladies, in order to exact your revenge if your man pulls out The Goods on you, make him watch The Time Traveler's Wife and I guarantee you'll get the upper hand! Let the hate-breeding begin!
The Bean Meter
[caption id="attachment_50862" align="aligncenter" width="188" caption="2.5 Beans out of 5."]
[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_50863" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="The cast pauses momentarily to comfort the Sellecks' 35-year-old 10-year-old son Peter."]
[/caption]
