The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard

A used car sales specialist (Jeremy Piven) is called in for a dealership emergency on July Fourth weekend. He and his team must sell every car on the lot, or the place will have to shut its doors. This leads to all sorts of crude humor involving automobile sales, and while some of it is mildly funny, most of it is stale. Piven is essentially doing his Ari Gold shtick in the guise of a car salesman, and he doesn’t get much in the way of support. James Brolin and Ving Rhames aren’t exactly comic gods, and it shows. Ed Helms of The Hangover gets a couple of laughs as the spoiled son of competing car lot owner (Alan Thicke), and Will Ferrell makes a funny cameo. Overall, the jokes just aren’t funny enough, and the movie’s timing belt goes flying off.