Director Doug Liman weaves together separate strands, telling the same story a number of times. The tale starts with a drugs purchase. Ronna (Sarah Polley) works on the tills of a small Californian supermarket. At the end of a long shift, she takes advantage of her pal Simon's absence to moonlight in his place as a small-time drug dealer.
Simon (Desmond Askew) rushes off to Las Vegas with two chums in another of the story's strands. One of his mates, Marcus (the rapidly emerging Taye Diggs), is a handsome black guy in a bright yellow jacket. Mistaken for a member of staff, he is handed the keys to a sports car. The three have a ball, with lots of sex, too much to drink and violence which ends with a car chase home. Blackpool was never this much fun.
Ronna, meanwhile, sets up the drugs deal with two actors, Adam (Scott Wolf) and Zack (Jay Mohr). She resolves to go directly to Simon's dealer, Todd (Timothy Olyphant). Whereas Simon is happy-go-lucky, Todd is a very different kettle of fish, brooding and malevolent. Ronna gets the required number of pills from Todd, but when she goes to see Adam and Zack, she senses something is wrong. The two chaps are the bait in a drugs sting, masterminded by the reptilian cop Burke (William Fichtner - this guy is fantastic, his best performance yet; fans will remember him from Armageddon). Ronna flushes the pills down the toilet and legs it.
The two boys have their own surprises in store, particularly in a rather unpleasant dinner party at the home of Burke and his wife Irene, played by Jane Krakowski, the snooping secretary in Ally McBeal. While Zack and Adam duck the rapacious advances of Burke and his Amway-loving wife, Ronna and her pals (Katie Holmes and Nathan Bexton) try to make up the deficit from the loss of the drugs by selling aspirin to aspiring teens. This is a story in which nothing goes as planned, but the complex, Tarantino-esque structure is balanced by a charming, zesty cast with tremendous performances from Mohr, Diggs and Holmes, who pushes her Dawson's Joey act up a notch.
Keywords:
Comedy, Crime, Drama, Comedy Thriller, Movie, Film, Movies, Films
Film
(1999) (USA) 
(3 Star)
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