Go (1999) starring Katie Holmes, Sarah Polley, Timothy Olyphant, Nathan Bexton, Scott Wolf, Jay Mohr, William Fichtner, Jane Krakowski, Desmond Askew directed by Doug Liman Movie Review

Go (1999)   3/53/53/53/53/5


Scott Wolf and Jay Mohr in Go (1999)

Teenage Pulp

"Go" whilst entertaining is not really original, anyone who knows their movies will instantly see similarities in the way it is constructed with "Pulp Fiction" as we see 3 storylines which ultimately link together. But whilst not original it is entertaining and occasionally clever in the way it surprises you by the tangents it goes off on. The annoying thing is that by the time it is over you will feel a bit entertained but you won't have the undying urge to watch again which sadly comes from the fact that it is not original.

So "Go" is basically 3 stories starting with Ronna (Sarah Polley) being approached by two men in the supermarket she works looking for Simon (Desmond Askew) to buy drugs from. In need of money Ronna decides to do the drug deal herself going to dealer Todd (Timothy Olyphant) and then on to the meet up with the men where things don't go as planned and ending up in a rave with her friends and Todd after her. We then get Simon's story which covers the same time period as he and his friends are in Vegas and after stealing a car get themselves in trouble at a strip club. This is followed by the story of Adam (Scott Wolf) and Zack (Jay Mohr) the two men who were looking to buy drugs and we see why they were trying to buy drugs and how their story connects with the others as everything eventually connects in one way or another.

Timothy Olyphant as Todd Gaines in Go (1999)

Now the thing is that stylistically "Go" is like "Pulp Fiction" with these various chapters which roughly focus on the same period of time and eventually link up as events in one storyline connect to something we see in the other. And in fairness this sort of set up is always entertaining but in the case of "Go" it just seems like it is trying too hard to be like "Pulp Fiction" rather than taking this concept off on a different tangent. In fact whilst these storylines do all connect at some point the actual connections end up quite weak and it ends up a movie about each individual amusing and sometimes clever storyline.

Now for me personally only one of these 3 storylines really works and that is the amusing one about Adam and Zack because it is full of surprises. The other two, Ronna buying drugs and ending up in trouble with Tony whilst Simon ends up in trouble with a strip club owner end up vacuous, they lack the cleverness to make them really entertaining. Oh there is action from an incident with a car knocking someone down to a car chase down a tight side road but it seems like it is trying too hard to be comical, throwing sex scenes, nudity and a drug scene at us which to be honest are not memorable. Maybe it I was 20 years younger the vacuousness of this would have amused me more but it ended up at times just feeling like a teen comedy with the novelty of being done in a "Pulp Fiction" style.

With this being about 3 different stories which interlink we also get a lot of recognizable faces and for me it is the actors in the Adam and Zack story which deliver the best performances. Scott Wolf and Jay Mohr along with William Fichtner and Jane Krakowski have the more interesting characters and surprises and they just seem to be having fun with the quirkiness of their characters and story which makes them amusing. Aside from them we also have Sarah Polley, Katie Holmes, Timothy Olyphant, Desmond Askew, Taye Diggs and Breckin Meyer but none of their characters are memorable, just teen like characters who may in fact be twenty somethings but haven't grown up yet.

What this all boils down to is that "Go" is entertaining and in the midst of what seems like teen humour done in a "Pulp Fiction" style there is some cleverness. But for the most it is vacuous entertainment which probably amuses and entertains young twenty somethings much more than it did me.


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