John August’s trickily structured script owes an all too obvious debt to “Pulp Fiction,” but Liman’s film is more like kiddie Tarantino. Guns are fired and shovels raised with murderous intent, but no one ever gets seriously harmed. Like its naive protagonists, the movie flirts with danger, only to back off and announce “Just kidding!” As he showed in “Swingers,” Liman has an ingratiating sensibility and an energetic style. “Go” is peppered with funny bits: kids talking themselves into a high on the cold medicine Polley passes off as ecstasy; Wolf and Mohr’s bickering, showbiz relationship, and best of all Fichtner’s insinuating lunacy as a drug cop with a screw loose.
Clever as the parts are, “Go” doesn’t add up to much. It starts to go awry in the frenetic Vegas episode, when you realize that things happen because the screenplay wills them to happen, not from any internal logic. It’s the whatever school of filmmaking. “Go” has its pleasures, but I didn’t really believe a word of it.
