Not So Much "Risky Business" as "Nasty Business"

Rating: 3/10 (14 January 2015)

Such is the shortage of original material in Hollywood these days that any decent film is likely to be remade, either as an official remake or as a disguised one which plagiarises the plot of its original without acknowledgement. Indeed, even films which were not very good in the first place can be candidates for this treatment. I can't for the life of me imagine why anyone might want to remake the early Tom Cruise vehicle "Risky Business", but "The Girl Next Door", although not officially a remake, is nevertheless a blatant rip-off of that dull eighties comedy.
Both films deal with an academically promising high school senior who has just been accepted by a prestigious university. (Georgetown here, Princeton in the earlier film). In both cases the boy needs to raise sufficient money to fund his studies. And in both cases he falls in love with a girl slightly older than himself. Now Hollywood is generally uncomfortable with younger man/older woman romances, but even Hollywood scriptwriters have to admit that "boy, 18, loves girl, 20" is not such an unusual or anomalous situation as to qualify as the apparently insuperable obstacle which forms a major plot element in most romantic comedies. There has to be something extra to make the young lady unacceptable to bourgeois society.
So in "Risky Business" the girl in question becomes a hooker, and here she is a porn star. At first young Matthew, the hero of the film, does not realise what his new girlfriend Danielle does for a living, but when he does he is horrified. Not so horrified, however, that he wants to end the relationship. His troubles start when Danielle, having discovered true love for the first time in her life, decides she wants to give up her career. Her agent and backers in the porn industry, however, see Matthew as a threat to their meal-ticket, meaning that he now finds himself in trouble with them, just as Joel, the hero of "Risky Business", found himself in trouble with his girlfriend's pimp.
Trying to remake a good film is a project fraught with difficulty, and trying to remake a bad one, officially or unofficially, is even more problematic. "The Girl Next Door" is no improvement on its less than distinguished predecessor. Indeed, in some respects it is even worse. Emile Hirsch, admittedly, makes a more sympathetic hero than did the irritatingly cocksure Tom Cruise as Joel; the cocky, irritating one here is Timothy Olyphant as Danielle's agent and ex-boyfriend Kelly, the equivalent of "Guido the Killer Pimp". The pretty but oddly-named Elisha Cuthbert is no substitute for Rebecca de Mornay, one of the few good things about "Risky Business". If Ms Cuthbert's parents had been paying more attention in Bible class, incidentally, they might have realised that "Elisha" was the name of a male Old Testament prophet. Having a forename which does not match one's gender, however, seems to be no drawback in the cinema. Just ask Cameron Diaz, Reese Witherspoon or Daryl Hannah. Or, for that matter, Mandy Patinkin.
The film was marketed as a teen comedy, but contains so much adult material that it is really only suitable for over-18s. I nearly said "contains so much adult humour", but that's just the problem. It doesn't actually contain much humour at all, adult or otherwise. As with a lot of modern so-called comedies, the script was written on the very dubious basis that tastelessness and breaking a few taboos- besides sex there are a few drug references- are an adequate substitute for wit. The final twist in the plot, involving an amateur porno video unexpectedly becoming a hit as a sex education film shown in schools across America, is ludicrous beyond even the normal standards of teen comedies. Not so much "Risky Business" as "Nasty Business". 3/10