April 9, 2004 | Risky Business is recycled as frisky
glibness in The Girl Next Door , a tickle-and-tease teen-sex
comedy about a straight-arrow high school senior who discovers his new
neighbor is a semi-retired porn star.
Predictably, young Matthew (Emile Hirsch)
forgets all about his future political ambitions – and the potential for indelible smudges on his
permanent record – when he gets a good look at sexy, shapely Danielle
(Elisha Cuthbert). Even less surprisingly, Matthew's raging lust evolves
into noble resourcefulness when he must defend Danielle from being repossessed
by Kelly (Timothy Olyphant), her exuberantly sleazy “producer.”
Working from a rather shamelessly derivative script by Stuart Blumberg,
David T. Wagner and Brent Goldberg, director Luke Greenfield ( The
Animal ) keeps Girl Next Door lurching from scene to scene
with little regard for pace, plausibility or tonal consistency. Indeed,
watching the movie is a bit like taking a late-night channel-surf through
soft-core comedies, American Pie wanna-bes and '80s Brat Pack
romances.
It doesn't help that the two leads are reasonably
attractive but hopelessly bland. It doesn't hurt, however, that Olyphant – currently
a Wild West anti-hero on HBO's Deadwood -- strikes a nifty balance of hearty
amiability and understated menace in his scene-stealing turn as the porn
impresario who's determined to talk his star into a comeback.
You can't always tell whether Kelly is meant
to a charming rogue or a brutal thug – or, most likely, a slightly more benign version of the “killer pimp” played
by Joe Pantoliano in Risky Business . And that's a good thing.
The ambiguity Olyphant generates provides a dramatic tension that is sorely
missing whenever his character is off camera.