Risky Business (1983)

Director: Paul Brickman

Story: Paul Brickman

Cast: Tom Cruise, Rebecca de Mornay

Music: Tangerine Dream

Time: 100 minutes

Bottom-line: A biting, hilarious satire

The film that established Tom Cruise as a star, Paul Brickman’s debut film is a coming-of-age rom-com, co-starring Rebecca de Mornay in the lead role, with Joe Pantoliano, Nicholas Pryor and Janet Carroll in the supporting roles.

There's a time for playing it safe and a time for Risky Business.

Meet Joel Goodson (Cruise), a high achieving high-school student, whose father wants him to join Princeton. Despite his average grades, Joel actively takes part in “Future Enterprises”, an extracurricular activity encouraging students to start small businesses. When his wealthy parents (Pryor and Carroll) go away on a trip, Joel’s friend urges him to make use of the new-found freedom. Joel hires a call girl, Lana (De Mornay) for a night, but he doesn’t have enough money to pay her. By the time he returns from the bank, Lana has escaped with his mother’s prized Steuben glass egg. Joel and his friend track her down, and end up saving her from her pimp, Guido (Pantoliano), who has locked up all her stuff, including the egg. Lana agrees that she’ll “make a few calls”, get the egg back and never see Joel again, but as Joel destroys his father’s Porsche and messes up his college interview, he realises that the situation has gone way out of control.

 

Cruise as Joel

Instead of just being a slapstick comedy like Home Alone, Risky Business explores several other themes too, like materialism, and loss of innocence. The irony of the story begins with the name of Cruise’s character: Goodson. He has been good too long, and now, it is time to break loose. The other irony is the incident with the egg: the whole confusion starts because Lana steals the egg, and in the end, when everything seems to be back to normal, Joel’s mother still gets angry because of a crack in the egg (“Joel will pay for a new one!”, says his father). The college interview is another key point of the story, when Joel realises that life is not about materialistic stuff and doing whatever it takes to have an impeccable record - “Sometimes, you just have to say what the heck and go with it”.

 

de Mornay as Lana

19-year-old Cruise rose to fame with his role as the happy-go-lucky school kid, dancing in his underwear and driving his dad’s Porsche, and at the same time having the first taste of adult life. Cruise has never been one to show emotion, but a character like this just needs a lot of energy, and Cruise provides that. He has a charm of his own, and combined with the chemistry with de Mornay, the two of them steal the show. The humour content is really good: from plot twists, from dialogues and from Cruise’s charisma. I liked the ending, where Joel pitches his idea of his enterprise as “serving human fulfilment”, for which he earned $8000 in one night.

This is easily one of the best high school/coming-of-age dramas I’ve ever seen. It has the right balance between teenage drama elements and adult content. Risky Business is 100 minutes of guaranteed entertainment.

My Rating: 3.5/5

Rotten Tomatoes rating: 96%