Go (1999)

Go arrives from 1999, a crime comedy assembled from three interlocking perspectives and powered by a great deal of stolen ecstasy. Doug Liman directs with a handheld restlessness that suggests he had somewhere else to be. The film follows Ronna, a supermarket clerk who needs rent money badly enough to impersonate a drug dealer, and the night proceeds to punish her for it. There is no moral attached. The movie has no interest in teaching us anything, which places it in a category that has grown lonely in the intervening decades.

The ensemble is more varied than the era required, with Taye Diggs and a multi-ethnic supporting cast appearing without ceremony. Queerness is structural here. Adam and Zack, the soap actors coerced into a police sting, are a couple, and their relationship is handled as ordinary fact. Ronna drives the first act with resourcefulness, though the film offers no thesis about it. The Christmas dinner scene skewers a multi-level marketing pitch, the closest thing to an economic argument on offer, and it plays for discomfort instead of doctrine.

The film's omissions are instructive. No climate anxieties. No body-positive messaging. No neurodivergent characters. No rewritten history. The tone is brisk, amoral, and entirely unserious. A reviewer at the Salt Lake City Journal observed that the film is not socially redeeming in any way, a verdict the movie would likely accept as a compliment. We are left with a well-made bauble, culturally aware in its casting yet innocent of the sermon. It entertains at an exhilarating pace and asks nothing of us afterward.