Speed, Baby, Speed

These new directors aren't interested in (or even, perhaps, capable of) making meaning that cuts any deeper than the emulsion. They're the equivalent of that great Top 40 tunesmith whose hook infects your head like a virus, but they've cranked the beat up to techno. And while the makers of Go borrow liberally from Pulp Fiction, unlike Tarantino or Boogie Nights' Paul Thomas Anderson, they're not engaged with film history. Where Tarantino and Anderson are consumed by precedents to the point that each of their features can be seen as a sort of meta-movie, these new cinema speed freaks are in it just for the ride from beginning to end. They're not out to change movies, much less history, or to add their names to some moldering canon. (What good is a canon anyway when nobody under 25, much less the country's leading critics, knows the difference between Lubitsch and La Cava?) At the very least, and at their most accessible, what filmmakers like Liman are doing is injecting movies with a desperately needed adrenaline, making them matter not just to purists but to the rest of the world. This may sound dire to die-hard cineastes, but in an age in which every other movie has been calculated to appeal to pubescent sensibilities that can't tell the difference between low-end sitcoms and high-concept features, when indies seem stuck in redundancy, if not irrelevancy, and satisfyingly crafted movies such as Clint Eastwood's True Crimeseem as lethargic and as pertinent as an IBM mainframe, a well-wrought pop fantasia like Go has its appeal, and its pleasures.

GO | Directed and photographed by DOUG LIMAN | Written and co-produced by JOHN AUGUST | Produced by PAUL ROSENBERG, MICKEY LIDDELL and MATT FREEMAN | Released by Columbia Pictures | Citywide