Teens in trouble

So they've relocated Dangerous Liaisons, Pygmalion and even Taming of the Shrew to modern-day, 90210-esque high schools and added liberal doses of teen eye-candy and cell phones. What's next? Middlemarch in Malibu? The Aeneid with Jennifer Love Hewitt? Well, as far as I can tell, Go isn't a remake, but it does hit the teen eye-candy requirement.

Go is divided into three segments. In the first segment, Ronna (Sarah Polley) is a disgruntled grocery store clerk whose bitter looks seem culled directly from the face of a Jersey Turnpike toll collector. Ronna finishes her shift on Christmas eve $380 short on rent money when she's stopped by her ambiguously British coworker Simon (Desmond Askew). I say "ambiguously British" because accent-wise, Simon can't decide if he's Scottish, Irish or British. Too much Monty Python and Trainspotting? Anyway, Simon is going to Vegas for the weekend, so he offers to give his shift to Ronna and pay her up front. Note this scene, because it's IMPORTANT: If Ronna doesn't take Simon's shift, well, the rest of the movie won't happen. Or it will happen, but only differently. Or something.

When two guys (Jay Mohr and Scott Wolf) walk into the grocery store straight out of a J. Crew catalog looking to buy 20 hits of ecstasy from Simon, Ronna sees dollar signs and agrees to supply them. She drives to The Supplier's Goth pad where he (Timothy Olyphant) lounges threateningly sans shirt listening to what is either Belly or Rod Stewart played backwards. The deal is for $300, but Ronna only has $200. So she blithely leaves her friend Claire (Dawson's Creek's Katie Holmes) as collateral, and skitters away to find the J. Crew guys. Which she does, but, suspecting a police set-up, she flushes the pills down the toilet and leaves the J. Crews and their shady-ass friend (William Fichtner) without the drugs.

Now Ronna's in trouble: She's got no drugs, and she owes The Supplier (and his chest hair) another $100 or no Katie Holmes, thereby rendering Dawson really, really angry. And you don't want to see Dawson angry.

Meanwhile, Simon's in Las Vegas with his three buddies (Taye Diggs-the only one that matters) getting into all sorts of trouble: "You stole a car, had sex with two women, and shot a bouncer?" Yup. Something involving a strip club, a bottle of champagne and a really nice Ferrari, and suddenly the four pals are in a car chase through the streets of Vegas.

Finally, in the third concurrent segment, we find out about the J. Crews and the shady-ass guy. And yes, now we get the story from their perspective.

Go may not be a remake, but it's a damn derivative of Pulp Fiction. That's not a bad thing, except that the movie gets boring after the first segment. Sarah Polley carries the beginning of the movie, but then she disappears, and director Doug Limon trades in character analysis for mindless action, slapstick and predictability. The film promises to deliver, but then ultimately waxes pretty vapid. It is, however, worth seeing for Sarah Polley, the moment where Taye Diggs says, "Is your British ASS happy now?!?" and for that Ferrari. Mmmm... Ferraris.