Go (1999)
Directed by Doug Liman
Written by John August
Starring Sarah Polley, Katie Holmes, Desmond Askew, Timothy Olyphant, Taye Diggs, William Fichtner

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

My friend has a great Doug Liman story. This friend was working as a PA on a Doug Liman movie and, between takes, somebody noticed a guy in a big jacket erratically pacing around the edge of the set. They didn't know if he was a fan trying to get a look at some celebrities or a random passerby who accidentally wandered into a place he shouldn't have been or what, but a producer sent another PA to talk to the guy and explain that they were filming a movie and he couldn't stay. Surprise, the jacket guy was Doug Liman. The director of this $85 million movie was wandering around lost in thought, preoccupied with figuring out his next shot, and producers were wondering if they'd have to call security to help get an unhoused person escorted away.

Liman reportedly found the whole situation funny and was good-natured about his crew thinking he was an oblivious drifter. Maybe it happens a lot. My friend described Liman as a kind of technical genius who could make big decisions immediately. An unforeseen obstacle would collide with the shooting schedule and Liman would shift on a dime, changing camera angles, lighting set-ups, etc., reworking the intricate plans he'd locked in months earlier. He's always thinking.

This is the sixth Quentin Tarantino knock-off I've written about here but it's only the second (after Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead) to be directed by somebody other than its writer. Filmmakers used their fake Pulp Fictions to establish themselves in the same way Tarantino had: as the whole package, writer-directors who could bring their personal ideas of Hollywood rebellion and cool to an audience ready to put any movie poster with a gun on their bedroom walls. Troy Duffy was an armchair vigilante and Christopher McQuarrie was sick and tired of studio notes. They were riffing on Tarantino's idea of cool while working their own specific worldviews into that formula. Doug Liman just wanted to shoot cool stuff in smart ways. His double duty was as Go's cinematographer and not as the person plotting out its themes.

This is not bad. Go, his 1999 is easily the most fun movie I've covered in this column. There's an interview with The Greatest Comics Writer, Daniel Clowes, in the book Daniel Clowes: Conversations that I think about a lot but can't quote exactly because my copy is on the other side of the country. Asked about what he was trying to get across in one of his books, Clowes says he isn't entirely sure and that if he had gone into the creation of any piece of art with concrete intentions, he would have been making propaganda. I go back and forth on whether I agree with that as a general philosophy, but it's unquestionable that The Boondock Saints and The Way of the Gun are propaganda. Those writer-directors were doing everything they could to convince you of their dim worldview and their opinions on storytelling, respectively. Liman wanted to make cool, exciting stuff that looked good and he clearly didn't want to communicate anything more explicit.

This is, I feel confident asserting, the only fake Tarantino movie without a body count. Nobody dies. There's one fake-out, but by the time the end credits roll, it's clear everybody you've been watching has walked away from the film's events a-okay. There are three overlapping stories and the worst consequences anybody in them faces are played off as jokes. Liman and screenwriter John August made a popcorn movie that insists upon nothing but joy.

Go opens with a rave and a glitchy dance track with a bunch of ironic samples where a square, most-likely white voice asks "What is rock and roll?" and then we cut to Claire (Katie Holmes) talking about Christmas with somebody we can't fully see and then we cut to Ronna (Sarah Polley), fed up and finishing a shift at a supermarket.

The movie doesn’t quite keep this pace, but it doesn’t slow down that much, either. The shots of the end of Ronna’s shift will repeat a few times, a small breather to denote the beginning of a new story. First we’ll follow Ronna, then a coworker headed to Vegas for the weekend and then two guys trying to score ecstasy off that coworker. Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction played with time and blended different characters’ semi-related stories in a more fluid way. There’s overlap here, but until the last twenty minutes or so, Go tells you one discrete story and then another and then another.

It makes sense to have all three begin in a supermarket. From Kevin Smith on down, 90s directors were interested in disaffected minimum wage retail workers. Ronna’s working extra shifts to make enough money to stave off eviction and she hates her job, but it’s what she’s got. She spends her breaks playing pop culture word games and doing whip-its with her coworkers.

Working one of those extra shifts, she runs into two guys, Adam and Zack (Scott Wolf and Jay Mohr), looking to buy 20 hits of ecstasy from the coworker she’s replacing. They're going to a Christmas rave and it'll suck if they have to go sober. Ronna doesn't have the ecstasy or the connections but she vaguely knows Todd (Timothy Olyphant!), the dealer her coworker gets his drugs from.

I wish Timothy Olyphant played this far off-type more often. He’s an asshole wearing a Santa hat that covers bleached Wolverine hair. He gets worried Ronna is a narc-- 20 hits is the amount where possession becomes intent to sell. But she gets the ecstasy and gets to the two guys, who are now joined by a third, older man (William Fichtner) in a nondescript apartment. She‘s pretty sure they’re cops. She flushes the drugs and walks away, free and down a bunch of drugs and $100.

Were this actually a Tarantino movie, that last paragraph would have unfolded over forty minutes, rather than fifteen. You can’t say Olyphant is wasted because he shows up again and makes the most of his time, but it’s a performance you wish got more shine. He’s around a little too long to fill the role Christopher Walken did in Pulp Fiction and True Romance, but not long enough to qualify as more than a supporting character in somebody else’s saga.

The drug deal with Fichtner should absolutely last longer. This is the stuff Tarantino and, later, imitators like Guy Ritchie made meals of. It’s the moment in Total Recall where Schwarzenegger realizes the guy he’s talking to is sweating, the just-a-little-off situation that becomes fishier by the second until the person you’re watching realizes she’s walked into a trap. These are the sequences people study, the dialogue teens read at high school drama auditions.

But I’m wrong. It shouldn’t last longer because, as always, Doug Liman knows what he’s doing. His movie is fast and often frictionless, and nothing can take too much time without Go becoming something it isn’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if August had written this intending the camera to linger a little longer on all the pauses and tense glares. It’s Liman’s movie though.

Ronna heads to the “Mary X-Mas” rave, Go’s second recurring location, which has an exterior similar enough to Jackrabbit Slim's you could imagine location scouts pausing Pulp Fiction and tracing its dimensions. Running from a suddenly appearing Todd, Ronna is hit by a car and left to die in a ditch.

New story! Simon, the coworker looking forward to his weekend in Vegas, leaves the grocery store and joins his friends (Taye Diggs, Breckin Meyer and James Duval) on the drive out of Los Angeles. By the time they’re out of Nevada, Diggs will have risen to co-star, a hotel room will be set on fire mid-tantric threesome and Simon will shoot a strip club bouncer in the arm, all of it culminating in a solid chase through a parking lot, onto the Strip and down a tight alley. It doesn't hit the Looney Tunes levels of something like Raising Arizona, but it's a blast.

Doug Liman doesn’t get enough credit for changing the way action movies looked for a while. People associate the Jason Bourne series with Paul Greengrass, who directed three of the series’ five films, but Liman helmed the first one, establishing the frenetic shaky cam and quick cuts that Greengrass would eventually stretch to the point of self-parody. After 1999, most action movies either looked like The Matrix or The Bourne Identity, and it was easier to make a pretty good fake Doug Liman claustrophobic mayhem than it was to make pretty good fake Wachowski sister computer-enhanced wire-fu, which means Liman’s style became an ingrained part of the texture of 2000s film and the Wachowskis’ style stayed most closely associated with them.

New story! Adam and Zack, the Wolf/Mohr duo, are headed to the grocery store to score 20 hits of ecstasy. In a nice, progressive-for-1999 touch, they’re a gay couple who happen to be a gay couple, by which I mean the movie doesn’t bother making their plotline all about their sexuality, it doesn’t introduce homophobic characters Adam and Zack get to shut down and neither character is a grating stereotype. They're people who are gay in the same way other characters are people who are straight. It's important, but not the driving force of their plotline.

Adam and Zack are TV actors who were caught by Fichtner's character in a drug bust and now Fichtner, clearly interested in them sexually, will only set them free if they help him catch Simon (who will then help him catch Todd) and then have dinner with him and his wife (Jane Krakowski). Fichtner is a great, versatile actor who, in the same way Olyphant never gets to play sinister, is rarely given the chance to be this funny. There are pauses in his speech that made me laugh harder than other actors' actual joke deliveries, and the ultimate purpose of his character is so smart and funny that I don't want to ruin it if you haven't seen the film.

Post-Fichtner, Adam and Zack track a man they're each having an affair with down to the Mary X-Mas rave, where they accidentally hit Ronna. The storylines converge as Ronna survives and Simon is given a retaliatory shot in the arm by the bouncer he attacked.

Where Liman would go on to establish a slew of tropes in The Bourne Identity, editor Stephen Mirrione would cut Ocean's 11 and its sequels. You've got a decade of influence on slick, cool cinema between those two. They knew how to make movies look fun, which isn't something people always remember to care about when filming scripts that already provide fun. Watch a recent comedy and tell me if it was directed and shot in any kind of novel, creative way, or if every shot is framed like the crew was making a network sitcom.

Doug Liman, in particular, is fascinating to me. I have a slightly different definition of the term than many, but I meant it when I called him a technical genius. I only started to understand him as a director when I read Steve Fishman's 2008 New York Magazine Liman profile. At the time the article was published, Liman was preparing Jumper, the film my friend PA'd on. So much of the article is about Liman's father, Arthur, an attorney who fought for Great Causes. If you make headway reforming the criminal justice system and expanding impoverished peoples' access to that system, you're going to set a bar your kid can't quite hit and Doug, for all of his success, views himself as being in the shadow of Arthur.

Besides that, Liman is described by Sarah Polley, who he remained close friends with, as a "complete mess." He directed Go while consulting The Sunset Guide to Basic Home Movie Lighting like a student filmmaker and came up with the movie's final scene with some friends after principal photography had wrapped. In 2008, Liman had made Mr. and Mrs. Smith and felt he had burned his "indie credibility" and talked about his deep-seated need to go off and make an independent movie that expressed something personal. He didn't make one of those for another nine years, and after that it was right back to big-budget blockbusters. Polley kept telling him to focus on his love for his father, to maybe make something about prison reform, and Doug thought it was a good idea but kept making impersonal action thrillers.

Earlier this year, twenty-four years after Go, Liman debuted his first documentary at Sundance. That film, Justice, seems to be the kind of film Liman was fretting about and telling himself he had to make. It's about the Brett Kavanaugh sexual assault allegations and it reportedly goes deeper into them than anybody's gotten yet. It's good for the world that Justice exists.

But I can't wave Go away as a trifle. It isn't speaking truth to power or bettering the world. It doesn't express any part of Doug Liman's internal world and it doesn't have much of a point. It's a hell of a lot of fun, a master craftsman's show of skill. That's important in its own way.

The Year is 1999: A few of the movies in this column have had smatterings of techno (most prominently, Killing Zoe's score), but Go makes that music the point. Raves were such a short phenomenon in America that it's a miracle they still existed by the time this movie came out. I know there were raves in the US in the early 90s and there continued to be raves into the new millenium, but the window of time where Fatboy Slim could play on mainstream rock radio was vanishingly small. The characters in Go are all wearing yellow wraparound shades and bright orange beanies and they look wonderfully ridiculous, and that's 1999 or it's nothing. Len's "Steal My Sunshine" debuted in this movie and on its soundtrack, if you want a more acute example of 1999 squeezing itself into one film.
Tarantino defectors: Timothy Olyphant would go on to act in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, but there aren't any defectors going in the other direction. Pretty wild Tarantino never put William Fichtner into a movie, but then I think everybody should put William Fichtner into their movies.
Weirdest member of the ensemble: Melissa McCarthy made her film debut here, but she's only around for a few seconds. I was more surprised to see Jane Krakowski, seven years before 30 Rock's debut, playing William Fichtner's character's wife. Both McCarthy and Krakowski are incredibly funny here.
Weirdest pop culture reference: Olyphant complains about The Family Circus to Katie Holmes. It's the last thing in the paper, he says, and it's so bad it retroactively ruins every good thing you've read. I enjoy The Family Circus as a portal into a conservative mirrorworld, but I get what he means.
Most Tarantino moment: This may be the first Impossible Royale to feature title cards like it's spiritual parent Pulp Fiction.
Needledrop setpiece: The "Macarena" remix that was everywhere from 1996-2000 plays during a fantasy sequence. You're never prepared to hear that song anymore.
Innovations in the subgenre: No killing! There's violence, but the lack of deaths is a big move that I doubt I'll see again as I dig through other movies like this.
Most ridiculous line of dialogue: Todd, responding to Ronna's request for a favor: "Wow, I didn't know we were such good friends, Ronna. Because if we were, you would know I give head before I give favors and I didn't even give my best friends head, so the chance of your getting a favor right now is pretty fucking slim."
Where did the writer go? This was John August's first produced feature screenplay and it led to a huge career, even if he isn't that big of a name. August helped write Titan A.E. and the two McG Charlie's Angels films (McG is at the top of the list of people who ripped Doug Liman off). From there, he became a frequent Tim Burton collaborator, writing Big Fish, that nightmarish Charlie and the Chocolate Factory remake, Corpse Bride, Dark Shadows and Frankenweenie. He wrote the live action Aladdin movie fellow Tarantino enthusiast Guy Ritchie directed and has a movie about Toto from The Wizard of Oz coming next year. I don't know what that means, but I'm intrigued.
Where did the director go? As I mentioned earlier, Doug Liman helped shape the modern action movie. Immediately after Go, he made The Bourne Identity and then the surprisingly influential Mr. and Mrs. Smith. To me, the big feather in his cap is Edge of Tomorrow, the Tom Cruise/Emily Blunt sci-fi war movie that bombed so hard Warner Bros. later renamed it Live. Die. Repeat. to help home media sales. I saw it in theaters, though. I did my part. If Edge of Tomorrow is on at a bar or if I run into it on a streaming service, I'll usually watch it. I once ordered dessert at a Mexican restaurant so I could spend more time at my table, watching Edge of Tomorrow on a TV over the pool table. Coincidentally, Edge of Tomorrow's script was punched up by The Way of the Gun's Christopher McQuarrie. The Ritchie/McQuarrie/August/Liman knot is tangled.
Left behind: Desmond Askew didn't break out the way some of his co-stars did, which is too bad. His energy and the way it collides with Taye Diggs' character's energy is a big part of why the second story works as well as it does.
Does it work? Yeah!