JEREMY Piven’s infa mous “sushi de fense” for skipping out on a Broadway role is easier to swallow than his performance as a scuzzy auto liquidator who sees the light in “The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard.”
Will Ferrell has specialized in such characters, but it’s easy to see why he confined himself to producing and playing a three-scene cameo role in the scattershot “The Goods,” with Piven uncomfortably cast in the role that Ferrell normally plays.
Sure, as he’s shown on “Entourage,” Piven can play a sleazeball with the best of them.
But he just can’t sell the character’s reformation in this sporadically funny movie, which — like the worst of Ferrell’s — is more often just plain stupid.
Piven’s character is summoned to run a no-holds-barred Fourth of July weekend clearance sale by James Brolin, who is about to lose his California used-car dealership to the bank — or perhaps rival dealer Alan Thicke.
Our strip-club-lovin’ hero energizes Brolin’s haphazard staff in unconventional ways, including, unfortunately, a racist beating of an Asian-American salesman (Ken Jeong) led by a demented old colleague (Charles Napier) who served in World War II.
Piven’s crack team includes fast-talking financial wiz David Koechner; Kathryn Hahn, who spins lesbian fantasies for prospective male buyers when she isn’t lusting after Brolin’s overly large 10-year-old son; and Ving Rhames, as a sensitive, retired pro bowler who has his own thing for a member of Brolin’s staff.
Things start off well thanks to a series of inventive sales scams — including a promised appearance by the brother of Bo Bice of “American Idol.”
But Piven himself is distracted by Brolin’s flirtatious daughter (Jordana Spiro), who is engaged to Thicke’s son (Ed Helms of “The Office”), an aspiring boy-bander.
“Something is being taken away from me, and I don’t like it,” Piven’s arrested-development case — who may also have a long-lost son on Brolin’s staff — whines at one point.
Ferrell probably would have knocked that line out of the park. Instead, Ferrell is literally accompanied by a heavenly choir.
“The Goods,” which shows signs of considerable tinkering in the editing room, is understandably not getting a hard sell at all by its studio.
THE GOODS: LIVE HARD, SELL HARD
Die easy. Running time: 91 minutes. Rated R (sex, nudity, profanity, drugs). At the Empire, the Chelsea, others.