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But it’s more than that. Like Pulp Fiction, Go’s three acts are devoted to telling the same story from three convergent points of view. The first act deals with Ronna and her increasingly incompetent efforts to style herself as a professional drug dealer. The second act inexplicably diverts us to Las Vegas, where Simon and his friends get into all sorts of amusing trouble, but it all seems entirely peripheral to the point of the story. The film’s entire middle section feels like irrelevant padding, and it tries just a little too hard to be cool. The diversion isn’t terrible, but it ultimately weakens the film. The third act focuses on Adam and Zach and while it feels more germane to the narrative, it isn’t until the last 20 minutes of the film that we get back to the point, which was what the hell happened to Ronna, Todd and Claire. It all kind of ends up feeling like a waste of time. But it isn’t all bad.

Go is a bit like an old Saturday Night Live sketch where you can pick out several people on screen who went on to become at least somewhat famous. Sarah Polley is a respected indie film maker. Jay Mohr fills in for Jim Rome from time to time, Timothy Olyphant is in demand and Katie Holmes married a famous extraterrestrial. I guess that’s interesting. Go is also something of a time capsule for the '90s: Hootie and the Blowfish, Lenny Kravitz, soy burgers, the Mazda Miata, beepers, raves, glo-stiks, tantric sex, a British guy in the cast for no reason...it’s like turning the calendar back to a simpler, more derivative time. But in the final analysis, Go is one of those movies where I find myself distracted by thoughts like “If this happened five years later and only two of the characters had cell phones, most of the horrible things that happened would NOT have happened”.

So while I do technically enjoy it, when your mind wanders that much while watching a 12-year-old movie, it means the thing hasn’t aged well.

But it’s okay. Like most homages to Pulp Fiction, there’s a lot of pointless self referential conversation, impromptu ultra-violence, reckless irony, mistaken identity, abject racism, knockoff designer fragrances, and seemingly unrelated storylines that make you forget what the movie was about in the first place...but somehow when it’s all over, it works. This is because just like Swingers - and unlike Pulp Fiction - Go is a lot of sound and fury that leaves its own universe largely intact and unchanged at the end. It’s like a television episode, where no matter how bad things get you know it’ll all get solved in time for the last commercial and next week, everything will be right back the way it was. It’s anticlimactic, harmless fun and it contains one of the most amusing wine references since A Clockwork Orange.

Now, if a movie can remind you of Pulp Fiction AND A Clockwork Orange and STILL make you laugh, it’s got to be worth watching once, right?

Right?

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