What is there to say about The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard? It fulfils every crude expectation of a 15-rated comedy, but, as I am almost embarrassed to admit, there are quite a few laughs to be had in this rather shameless reworking of Robert Zemeckis’ 1980 film Used Cars. The film also gets more than a few brownie points for casting the brilliant Entourage star Jeremy Piven in its lead role, alongside a cast of popular comics in various bit-parts and cameos.

Ben Selleck (James Brolin) has been running a car dealership for four decades, but he has come upon rough times, and is going to lose his business unless he can devise a drastic solution to his problems; enter Don Ready (Jeremy Piven), a “mercenary” hotshot salesman that Selleck hires, along with Ready’s own sales team, to sell all 210 cars in the lot during the Fourth of July sale. If Ready cannot sell all of the cars, then Selleck has no choice but to sell his lot to Stu Harding (Alan Thicke), a competing auto trader who is father to the insufferable Paxton (The Office and The Hangover star Ed Helms), who is himself dating Selleck’s daughter Ivy (Jordana Spiro). Ready must not only contend with the seemingly insurmountable task of selling the cars, but also deal with his own personal demons (particularly with regard to a mysterious occurrence in Albuquerque), and fight his undeniable attraction to the already spoken-for Ivy.

Although unremittingly, almost admirably crass at times, the real reason to even consider watching The Goods is for its distinguished comic line-up, including Arrested Development’s Tony Hale (Buster himself), The Hangover’s Ken Jeong, The Office stars Ed Helms and Craig Robinson, Step Brothers star Kathryn Hahn, who essentially recycles her role from that film as a manically obsessive woman (although there are sadly no lines as sordidly hilarious as “I wanna roll you up into a little ball and shove you up my vagina”), and there’s even a brief cameo from Will Ferrell. Ving Rhames also gets a rare chance to flex his comic muscles as one of Ready’s sales team who is on the prowl for a woman he can make love to, rather than ravage.

You need only watch a few minutes of HBO’s Entourage to succumb to Jeremy Piven’s charmingly outrageous performance, and although Piven is never really given the full floor here, the R-rated material unassailably suits his style. Even when the script falters and stumbles, Piven’s winning presence keeps things from flagging outright. The sheer insanity of the script, firing on all frenzied cylinders, means that the hit-to-miss ratio is difficult to tally (and largely irrelevant), for the gags fire out at such a pace that there’s little time to observe the duds intermittently flying past you. This is hardly high-brow material, but it does press the right buttons, and there’s a surplus of cutting jibes on the right side of daring, compensating for the times when they aren’t.

Just when the film begins to settle into comfortably irresponsible, even tasteless territory, though, it decides to try and make a sympathetic character out of Piven’s Ready, making absolutely sure that we know how the film is going to end as a result. While it does well to never get too wrapped up in this element, there would be more to admire had the film dispensed with the usual sentiment and made Ready simply a self-obsessed car salesman with no time for pleasantries and platitudes, in the same vein that Piven made so charming in his Entourage role. These sentimental moments fail to sink the picture, though, and in fact, one moment you might expect to be sentimental, involving the mysterious “Albuquerque incident”, actually results in one of the film’s funniest moments, with a delicious cameo from Will Ferrell.

The film’s climax is undeniably daft, but acknowledges this conceit, while the resolution of the romantic subplot is the film’s most abhorrent moment, doing away with any inkling of morality regarding faithfulness and relationships, and simply handing it to the hero “because he’s the good guy, and the kinda bad guy is a bit of a douchebag” rather than because he earned it, or because the bad guy deserves such treatment. It leaves something of a sour taste to brush things under the carpet so cleanly, and for the characters to act in such a robotic way is indicative of lazy writing for the sake of tying everything up with a pretty bow. Nevertheless, the final sequence, which rather cynically reveals what happens to the lead characters after the events of the film, does somewhat make up for this.

The tone can be jarring at times, and the attempt at building a sympathetic lead character is an abject failure, but there are frequent laughs throughout, and a great cast to support the material. The film misses almost as much as it hits, but as a mildly charming, often amusing film, this is proof that setting your expectations low sometimes has surprising results.