Risky Business

Before there was Ferris Bueller or Marty McFly there was Joel  Goodsen, a fresh faced teenager living in a well-heeled Chicago suburb and in his final year of high school. When his parents go away leaving him in charge of the house he arranges for a call-girl to visit the family home. Needless to say, everything goes wrong.

In what was his first major screen role Tom Cruise gives an energetic performance (his miming to Bob Seeger’s ‘Old Time Rock ‘n’Roll' being the stand-out albeit dubious instance thereof) in writer-director Paul Brinkman’s slick teen exploitation movie evidently designed to appeal to an adolescent and post-adolescent white male audience.

The quite ridiculous story tells how, with help of venal hooker Lana (Rebecca De Mornay), Joel turns his parent’s home into a pop-up brothel for his fellow school mates after he accidentally drops his father’s Porsche into Lake Michigan and needs to get it fixed (something which. like much of the movie is glibly handled). There is some intimation that at a meta-level this scenario is intended as a satire on American consumer capitalism however in its audience-pandering admiration of Joel’s Teflon cockiness ultimately it endorses what it purports to criticize - material success is its own justification. There is no doubt however about the film’s entrenched sexism. Lana is the traditional whore/girl-next-door (the sex scenes are surprisingly stylish soft-core) dedicated to the gratification of Joel’s sexual fantasies. Teen romance this is not.

With its incongruous Tangerine Dream synthesizer score and glossy visuals tying together a superficial plot, unlike Back To The Future (1985) or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) other than for Tom Cruise fans Risky Business is a charmless affair that offers few pleasures in itself and at best stands testament to 1980s American mainstream values.

 

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