I have to admit that before I saw this film, I only knew two things about it:
1. The soundtrack was done by Tangerine Dream. 2. Tom Cruise dances around the house in his underwear to Bob Seger.
It turns out that both of those things are true.
"Risky Business" is about a kid named Joel Goodsen ("Good" "Son", get it?) (played by Tom Cruise), a clean-cut high school kid who learns what it's like to say "f--- it," and take risks when his parents go out of town. Joel's goals at the beginning of the movie center around getting into a good college and planning for his future. As the film progresses, however, we watch Joel make decisions that get him further and further into trouble, and we're expected to be amused as he tries to make his way out of it.
The trouble that Joel gets himself into centers mainly around an attractive hooker, Lana, who is played by Rebecca de Mornay. One thing I did like about this movie was that de Mornay didn't play the "hooker with a heart of gold" role that has become all-too-familiar with post-Pretty Woman actresses who play hookers. Joel gets involved with Lana and her hooker friends, tries to help them out of trouble, and ends up getting getting into a tailspin of drama that includes, but is not limited to, death threats from "Guido the killer pimp." He eventually gets trapped into a situation where he needs lots of money, fast, and ends up compromising pretty much every value he held dear to him before his parents went out of town. Plus, he ends up with a hooker for a "girlfriend," which I think is pretty gross, and I was confused as to why Joel Goodsen (or anyone besides a junkie or something) would want a girlfriend who sleeps with random dudes for money.
My biggest complaint is that Joel ended up as a much worse person by the end of the movie than he did at the beginning. The film had absolutely no pathos. Pre-corruption Joel asks his friends if they're interested in doing anything in life besides making money. He mentions cornily that he wants to help his fellow man. By the end of the film, Joel's last lines are: "My name is Joel Goodson. I deal in human fulfillment. I grossed over eight thousand dollars in one night." The kid compromises all of his values, and seems to have learned absolutely nothing about how dirty and hopeless prostitution can be--the closest he comes to having an epiphany on his actions seems to be that "If there were any logic to our language, trust would be a four letter word." But shortly after saying that, he makes multiple decisions that would have one guess that he's never been there or done that before, which includes trusting a prostitute, for God's sake, over and over again, even though she screws him over each and every time.
I guess if the goal of this movie was to watch high school kids get into various debaucheries with women who get paid to screw for a living, they've succeeded well. Additionally, if writer/director Paul Brickman (who went on to do pretty much nothing, by the way) meant to show that becoming a pimp can bring money, success, and entrance to the university of your choice, then he succeeded. Maybe he meant this to be a little darker than the average comedy, and maybe this movie would have found a more supportive audience in the year in which I was two years old, but I just found my sympathy for the characters and the movie as a whole went nowhere but down as the movie went on.
17 out of 34 found this helpful