Released at a time when there was no shortage of poorly-written teen movies (as if there ever is a shortage of those), Go came on the scene like a breath of fresh air, or at least a refreshing puff of pot smoke. Rather than following spoiled brat rich kids through yet another reworking of a classic (aka familiar and cliché-laden) story, we instead get characters who are screwed-up regular folks and an original tale of bad judgement, questionable morality and repeated near-disaster.
Essentially, this is a thirty-minute story presented three times over, each time from the perspective of a different character. The first two segments leave the final outcome unresolved, each taking the story a bit further until the finale when it’s all cleared up.
We start with Ronna (Sarah Polley), a young woman with cash problems who thinks she's found a way to make some quick bucks. She has no qualms about doing a bit of drug dealing to solve her cash crunch, but soon finds her situation going from bad to worse, with an angry higher-level dealer after her.
The film’s second segment focuses on Ronna's fellow grocery store clerk, the wildly over-confident Simon (Desmond Askew), who departs for a weekend in Las Vegas just before Ronna gets herself into all thatd rug-dealing trouble. What Simon becomes entangled in turns out to be at least as scary as Ronna's shenanigans.
The third and final segment of the film follows Zach and Adam (Jay Mohr and Scott Wolf), two young actors whose own drug troubles have them entangled with a weird cop. Naturally, these three stories manage to link by the time things reach their climax.
Everyone in Go is in trouble because of drugs, but none of them seems to have a clue that this is the case. Everyone faces difficult decisions, but none seems to make smart choices, even after you might thing they’ve had chances to shift direction. The only people in the story who have their wits about them at any point are Simon's travel companion Marcus (Taye Diggs) and Ronna's friend Claire (Katie Holmes), and even these two let themselves get dragged into some incredibly dangerous situations.
Director/cinematographer Doug Liman (Swingers) has pulled together a fast-paced and entertaining story of intrigue, with mishandled drug deals, gangster chases, shootings, raves and plenty more. The story’s jumping back and forth in time makes the film disjointed at times, and the relative lack of appealing characters leaves us wanting a 'good guy' and never finding one, but the movie’s action and humour keep us from getting too worked up about it.
Go is an original and funny movie that leaves us marvelling at the weak sense of right and wrong each character possesses. They're lucky just to survive a night on the town, let alone living successfully through the challenging late 1990s.
