Aston's GO Review April 12/99

My Plan was to see Cookie's Fortune this weekend, as I am a huge Altman fan but apparently the curse on my life conspired againstme yet again... First of all the provincial town in which I now reside didn't have a single theater showing Cookie's Fortune. Second of all the date I had on Saturday was such a disaster I bagged any plans I had for going to the movies the next day. Let me just take a minute here to talk about dating ettiquite.... It is just plain rude to discuss ex-boyfriends/girlfriends on the first date.
If you are still interested obsessed or in love in your last boyfriend/girlfriend do not agree to go out with anyone who asks you out. You are just wasting your time and theirs, and making the person on the other side of the table miserable and depressed in the process. In my dates defense she waited until the salad course to tell me that her "ex" called her the other night and wants to try and get back together.

Ok now with that out of the way lets talk about Doug Liman's film Go. Overall, Go is a good but not a great film. The camera work was superb (that one is for you Lieutenant). The dialogue is realistic. The
story however, had some serious structural problems. The biggest flaw with this film is the narrative introduces us to some fascinating characters then abandons them to follow others just as we get interested in finding out what is going to happen. Then when it is time to bring everyone back for the finish the writer seemed to get lazy and settled for what my friends and I like to call a, "neat and tidy
ending." Liman spends far too much time concentrating on the Zack and Adam (Jay Mohr and Scott Wolf) subplot, when the real gold was in the Vegas story with excellent performances from Taye Diggs and Desmond Askew as two guys out on the town in Las Vegas who run into far more excitement then they expected. Another small problem is that the script expends far too much energy on characters that, while entertaining, have no real purpose. Liman and August could have
easily removed 4 characters and not affected the feel of the film one bit, nor would it have affected the plot. Then time and energy could have been spent fleshing out the weak third act, and the abrupt feel-good ending that is totally inconsistent with the tone of the film.

The hardest part of non-linear storytelling is bringing all the threads back together in a way that not only resolves all the plot points, but also rewards the audience for paying attention putting up with the momentary confusion that occurs when the story jumps around in the arc. Unfortunately the threads in Go never get brought back together in a satisfactory way. I know this sounds like I hated the film but I didn't, there was much to like about Go. The performances of all the actors were well done. The music was excellent; I particularly loved the remix of Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride" during a well-filmed Chase sequence. Liman seems to have a classic case of sophomore slump here the film has a lot of potential but misses the mark mainly because it tried to accomplish too much. Go fails at trying to bring� too many stories together on screen. Part of the reason Swingers was such a success was that the director did an effective job of making the audience feel like they were voyeurs in real people's lives. That effect is in Go as well, but the pacing, the sheer number of supporting characters and the non-linear style of the film leaves the audience expecting more at the end then the film delivers.

Fans of Liman should see this film, and Generation X and Y should enjoy the dialogue and the flashy story telling style, but non-film buffs will be underwelmed.I give it a C+