Go (1999)

SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

On the Christmas Eve, the cashier of supermarket Ronna Martin (Sarah Polley) is completely broken and will be evicted from her apartment on the next morning. She accepts the offer to cover the shift of her British co-worker Simon Baines (Desmond Askew) that wants to travel to Las Vegas to have more money. While working, the clients Adam (Scott Wolf) and Zach (Jay Mohr) seek out Simon to buy ecstasy and ask Ronna if she can get the drug for them. Ronna goes to the apartment of Simon's drug dealer Todd Gaines (Timothy Olyphant) to buy the ecstasy but she does not have enough money for twenty pills; so her friend and colleague Claire Montgomery (Katie Holmes) stays with Todd to guarantee the payment. When she goes to the address of Adam and Zach, she meets Burke (William Fichtner) and suspects that he might be an FBI agent. She drops the ecstasy in the toilet and flushes it. Now she has neither the drugs nor the money to give to Todd. Meanwhile Simon travels to Las Vegas and gets into trouble in a night-club with very dangerous people and he needs to flee from the town with his friends. Meanwhile, Burke drops the charges against the informers Adam and Scott and invites them to spend Christmas night having dinner with his wife and him, but Burke has a secret agenda. "Go" entwines three segments with the stories of three employees of a supermarket on the Christmas Eve. The screenplay is very well written with three simultaneous stories disclosed independently with points of contact. The cast is fantastic highlighting the extraordinary Sarah Polley. The confusions are hilarious and the weakest segment is the one relative to the gay actors Adam and Zach. My vote is eight.Title (Brazil): "Vamos Nessa" ("Let's Go")

This fast-paced, inventive ensemble comedy from '99 has held up very well. In light of later developments, especially on cable, the timeshifting, "Pulp Fiction"-like structure seems less obtrusive and gimmicky than it did back in the day. Each of the interlocking episodes takes off from the same event, which we see several times over—a cash-strapped supermarket clerk takes a shift for a co-worker, who happens to be a retail drug dealer. Consequences, for three different sets of characters, include a shambolic roadtrip to Vegas, a shooting in a strip club with threatened retaliation, an ironic car chase, a BF left with a higher-level dealer as collateral for a drug buy, and a queasy-making dinner party hosted by a pair of narco cops. There's lots of chaos and violence, but it's cartoon violence, basically, and nobody's much the worse for it (triple-shifting Ronna gets hit by a car and left for dead, but she's back at her register on Monday). Every episode includes at least one really good time-release sightgag; to spoil just two—when Taye Diggs, as one of the roadtrippers, puts on a spiffy blazer in a casino, a guy gives him a tip in the men's room; at the casino enrance another guy tosses him the keys to his car… Smart, casual dialogue, not as self-conscious as in "Pulp Fiction"; my favorite line is a throwaway diss of the comic strip "Family Circus." Commendable cast includes Sarah Polley, playing it tough, as Ronna, Katie Holmes (she's good!) as the BF, a baby-faced Timothy Olyphant as the dealer, plus Jay Mohr as a TV actor in jeopardy; great to see a dewy young Jane Krakowski and Melissa McCarthy in lesser roles. Turns up on a cable a lot; available on disk from Netflix.

It's really too easy to compare Go to Pulp Fiction; it just goes without saying. Tons of movies were released in the 90's that followed Tarantino's flair of crime movies with quirky characters, dark comedic moments and non-linear timelines. Go sits squarely with films like Snatch and Get Shorty as one of the better ones, the ones that have their own style and don't feel like a Tarantino knock-off.Go is a clever film, with a tight and solid script. The characters aren't quite interesting enough and the atmosphere isn't quite stylish enough to make it as memorable as Guy Ritchie's early work, but it's a fun ride which supplies thrills and laughs all the way through, though it lacks in character depth and development, partly because it stuffs too many characters into just under 100 minutes. Stylistically, Go feels a bit too much like a TV production; the fact that most of the cast are by now familiar TV mainstays doesn't help - Katie Holmes (Dawson's Creek), Scott Wolf (Table for Five, Everwood), Timothy Olyphant (Deadwood), William Fichtner (Prison Break), Jane Krakowski (30 Rock) and Jay Mohr (Action, Garry Unmarried) are all quite good but many of them feel amateurish at times, and don't help much in defining the already shallow characters.All of which makes Go feel a little like a writing student's exercise, with too little for the viewer to relate or connect to; but it's clever, fast-paced and entertaining enough to be very rewarding, especially at its modest runtime. It's a lightweight movie that won't stay with you too long, but it's tons of fun to watch.

What can I say, of all the movies set during Christmas this has to be the most bizarre, yet also one of the most satisfying. That said, the fact that it is set during Christmas is not as important as what actually happens. This movie is a very humorous account of a night from three perspectives. There are moments that you just cannot see coming, and the characters feel surprisingly real. The acting is in some cases (William Fichtner), great, while in others (Sarah Polley), simply okay. However, there is nothing in this movie that I would consider unsatisfactory. It is simply one of the most enjoyable movies I have watched in a long time and I highly recommend it to those who are fans of movies such as Pulp fiction or those of the British TV series "The Inbetweeners"