Director Doug Liman, who set off an unfortunate explosion of cocktail sipping and jitterbugging among the khakis crowd with his 1996 hit "Swingers," once again treads the Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas territory, this time with a shadier assortment of characters. The action takes place over a short period of time and with three distinct yet overlapping story lines, a device that is so patently "Pulp Fiction" it's embarrassingly obvious to even bring it up (but you'll probably be hard pressed to find a review of "Go" that won't). Unlike the denizens of the Tarantino opus, however, these fuck-ups on the wrong side of the law aren't quite so deeply ensconced in the seedy milieus of drugs and violence. They're youthful day-trippers, passing through the underworld and trying not to get roughed up.

The story begins and ends with Ronna (Sarah Polley from "The Sweet Hereafter"), a bored L.A. grocery store employee about to be kicked out of her apartment for not paying her rent. Luckily, her colleague Simon (Desmond Askew), a pasty-faced part-time drug dealer, is dying to get out of town and needs someone to cover his shift. Her luck gets even better when well-heeled TV actors Adam and Zack (Scott Wolf and Jay Mohr) show up in Simon's checkout line looking for a little more than orange juice and snack cakes.

Over the course of the next several hours, Ronna will wind up buying a sizable packet of pharmaceuticals, losing the goods, making a tidy sum fobbing off baby aspirin as Ecstasy to clueless ravers, being threatened with a gun and run over by a sports car. Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, Simon is busily crashing weddings, engaging in a tantric ménage ā trois, setting hotels on fire, shooting bouncers and flashing around the wrong guy's credit card. And back in L.A., the two jittery actors are working out relationships, engaging reluctantly in a sting operation, covering up a crime and discovering, by way of a touchy-feely detective and his wife, just how open-minded they need to be to get some charges against them dropped.

Next page | Odd couplings and strange fantasies.