Go (Film Review)

1999 Sony Pictures
Directed by: Doug Liman; Written by: John August
Starring: Taye Diggs, William Fichtner, J. E. Freeman, Katie Holmes, Breckin Meyer, Jay Mohr, Timothy Olyphant, Sarah Polley, and Scott Wolf
MPAA Rating: R; Running Times: 102 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 7/10

Teenaged Ronna is desperate, facing eviction right before Christmas, as she works overtime cashier shifts at her local crappy supermarket. When her drug-dealer co-worker leaves for a guys trip to Vegas, Ronna makes a risky decision to procure drugs for two of his clients, making a deal with her co-worker's dangerous supplier for a bottle of medical grade ecstasy. Unfortunately for Ronna, everything goes wrong. The clients are Narcs, so Ronna has to quickly throw away the drugs, she ends up selling Tylenol as ecstasy to the local kids at a massive Christmas rave to get the money she needs, the supplier catches up and is about to shoot her, then a mystery car drives by, hits her, and she's left for dead in a ditch...and we're only 30 minutes into the movie. Unfortunately, this is the point in John August's script where we completely leave Ronna's story for that of her co-worker, Simon, the idiot who's off in Vegas having idiotic adventures with his idiotic friends. This significantly less interesting story has a few positives, namely Doug Liman's kinetic direction and lovely cinematography of the American West in 1999, along with Stephen Mirrione's snappy editing...but then, after a silly but fun car chase, we leave that story for an even less interesting one. Now we're with the two guys who wanted to buy drugs from Ronna, who are not only a couple of Narcs, but actors fulfilling a promise to go undercover for a weird police officer who seems strangely into their bodies. Surprise, surprise, these two bland as beige wallpaper characters are the ones who hit Ronna with their goofy yellow sports car. And now, after an hour of silly time-wasting, we finally find out what happens to Ronna.
Go tries with all the gusto its $20 million dollar budget can muster to summon the zeitgeist of 1999. Sometimes it succeeds, mostly by the grace of its incredible, rave-influenced soundtrack, Sarah Polley's infectious attitude and misplaced self-confidence as Ronna, the over-the-top and somehow lovable psychopathic antics of Timothy Olyphant's drug supplier, and visuals that conjure the times, even if the script and dialogue feel like "How do you do, fellow kids" try-harding. A 90 minute film solely focused on Ronna's story, even with some of the try-hard dialogue, might have been a late-90s near masterpiece. Unfortunately, the second and third scenarios August has cooked up just aren't very interesting, and the film's Pulp Fiction-inspired jumps in time and perspective, along with an unnatural attempt at aping Tarantino's monologuing, feel unnecessary. 
The result is a just okay film that I am probably overrating in my 7/10 score because of my nostalgia for 1999, the greatest year in human history, when I, coincidentally, both worked as a hard-luck teenaged grocery store cashier (at the Winn Dixie) needing to pay bills, and also drove across the American West (during that summer, from Louisiana, all the way to the Pacific)...anddddd also had a much older male boss (who had hired me on at a new job I defected to late in the year) who continuously made strange and uncomfortable passes at me. For those reasons, I feel some connection to, and will always be able to watch and somewhat enjoy this inconsistent film, despite its myriad flaws. For someone who experienced their late teen years after Y2K, but still wants to know what it was like to do so right before, Go doesn't exactly capture it, and in some cases, is nowhere close, but some of the vibes here...they're accurate. Some of them.