Liman's last movie, the wry, sharply observant Swingers, was one of the best independent films to be released in recent years, and I was eager to see what he would do with a bigger budget and a larger canvas. Go consists of three self-contained but overlapping sequences. In the second, Simon and a carful of his friends go to Las Vegas for the weekend and run afoul of the bouncer at a massage parlor. In the third, the action shifts back to Los Angeles, and we learn the fate of the other participants in the original deal. In fact, black comedy is anything but frivolous.
People are profoundly bad, but irresistibly funny.
Presumably some assistant professor of cultural studies has since come forward to declare Stern a latter-day Swift, but he is nothing more than a trousered ape whose loutish jeering is to black comedy what the transcript of the O. J. Simpson trial was to Othello. But what follows instead is an hour's worth of increasingly witless slapstick, at the end of which we learn, abruptly and incredibly, that Ronna is not dead after all, just badly bruised. The air quickly hisses out of the film, and what started out as a cold-eyed satire about the way we live now collapses into a morally meaningless farce in which everybody gets away with everything. No doubt Doug Liman would beg to differ. This philosophically trained pope is not given to shallow sound bites, and when he speaks of the culture of death, he has in mind a deep-seated, collective nihilism of which illegal drugs, idiot shock jocks, and mindlessly violent movies are mere symptoms.