Go is a gloriously slick and hip thrill machine. Director Doug Liman--who also photographed--and screenwriter John August celebrate the drug/rave culture of Los Angeles, preferring comedic snapshots of troubled youth to a critical probing of the same. After more than ninety minutes of pill-popping, tantric sex, car chases, and attempted murder, Go even finds a way to end happily. Go is the sort of film that gives members of the Dove Foundation splitting headaches--as it wound down, I anticipated an anti-pill-popping-casual-tantric-sex-car-chase-attempted-murder sermon that (blessedly) never arrived.

But the film is otherwise easy to peg. A la Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Go is an anthology of three separate but corresponding shorts. The basics are as follows: Ronna (Sarah Polley) is a bitter grocery store clerk facing eviction who turns to drug dealing for extra cash. Her co-worker, Simon (the improbably named Desmond Askew), is a club-hopper from Britain about to embark on his first trip to Vegas. Zack (Jay Mohr) and Adam (Scott Wolf) are soap opera stars escaping a career-threatening conviction by assisting a peculiar cop (William Fichtner) in a drug bust. Perhaps because the innovative structure of Tarantino's non-linear masterwork is by now old hat, the id-fueled Go delighted me while rarely surprising me (with the exception of a scene-stealing, mind-reading cat!); Pulp Fiction zigzagged down roads unforeseen, but we sense the direction in which Go's wheels are turning from the film's first strobe frame to its last.

Torontonian Polley (of The Sweet Hereafter) refused to do publicity for the picture on the grounds that she was "not pleased with" her turn as the ill-fated cashier. In Go, she delivers, hands-down, her finest performance to date. Here's an (overrated) actress whose image adorns the poster selfishly refusing to support her team at the junket or in interviews--this sort of arrogance being commonplace for Ms. Polley, as anyone who has kept track of her political agenda in the Canadian press can tell you. If she doesn't want to risk the It Ingenue label, she should have said "No!" to Go.

But I digress. Go is a fun film so chipperly depraved that one can't help but put a lid on his or her moral compass for the duration of its ride. In that way, it's a departure from Liman's last film, Swingers, which at least lectured against self-absorption in the form of Vince Vaughan's Trent and his subtle comeuppance in the story's clever epilogue (aped by McDonald's in their latest commercial). I wish I could have formed a greater bond with the members of Go's rogue's gallery: like their music of choice (techno), they are at once enthralling and vacuous. When the lights came up and stung my eyes, it was difficult to recall why the picture entertained me so.

Go is light and frothy and features compelling if not endearing work from Polley, Timothy Olyphant (Scream 2), and especially Fichtner, whose homoerotic behavior is milked for effective laughs. Fichtner is a character specialist best known for playing backstabbers (in Heat, Armageddon, and others); the actor's previously untapped comic abilities shine in Go. Unlike the sum of the film, Fichtner is a real wild card.-Bill Chambers