GO (1999)
A Film Review
Copyright Dragan Antulov 2005
In second half of 1990s many filmmakers tried to repeat the
success of Tarantino's PULP FICTION by taking inspiration
from its plot, characters or narrative structure. Few did so with
less originality than Doug Liman in his 1999 black comedy GO
and few were as successful as him.
Just like in PULP FICTION, plot of GO is non-linear and it is
made out of three connected and crime-related stories taking
place in Los Angeles in a span of 24 hours. Ronna (played by
Sarah Polley) is a supermarket clerk who must quickly find few
hundred dollars to pay the rent or spend Christmas Eve on the
street. Because of that she is more than willing to fill in for
Simon (played by Donald Askew), her colleague and part-time
drug dealer who decided to spend Christmas in Las Vegas. It
looks like a very good idea when two men - Adam (played by
Scott Wolf) and Zack (played by Jay Mohr) - come to her store
in order to buy twenty ecstasy pills. She makes a deal, but first
she must get the stuff from Simon's supplier Todd Gaines
(played by Timothy Olyphant). Gaines doesn't trust Ronna, so
she tries to use her friend Claire Montgomery (played by Katie
Holmes) as collateral.
Apart from non-linear structure, Liman also took other parts of
Tarantino formula - black humour, pop culture references,
explicit bloodletting and unapologetic drug abuse.
Unfortunately, Liman couldn't take other, more important
elements of PULP FICTION like, for example, Tarantino's talent
to connect seemingly separate stories into coherent whole. John
August's script, which originally dealt only with Ronna, was
broadened with two additional stories lacking humour and
interesting characters.
However, all that didn't matter much to movie's target
audience - Tarantino-worshipping youths who appreciated
cynical, hedonistic and nihilistic worldview promoted in GO.
They were also won over by a running time more suited to their
average attention span, as well as MTV style of direction and
"cool" soundtrack. But the greatest asset of the film were
members of young cast, many, like Katie Holmes, a familiar
faces to fans of teen-themed television dramas. They acted very
well. This especially so in the case of Sarah Polley, which isn't
surprising, because her character is the protagonist of the film's
best segment. Unfortunately, good acting can't transcend the
derivative nature of this film and GO, despite being relatively
popular in its time, is unlikely to match status of its ultimate
inspiration.
RATING: 4/10 (+)
Review written on March 31st 2005
Dragan Antulov a.k.a. Drax
http://film.purger.com
Film Reviews in Croatian/Filmske recenzije na hrvatskom
http://draxreview.blogspot.com
Draxblog Movie Reviews
http://www.ofcs.org
Online Film Critics Society
========== X-RAMR-ID: 39634 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1373692 X-RT-TitleID: 1087053 X-RT-SourceID: 1650 X-RT-AuthorID: 1307 X-RT-RatingText: 4/10
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews