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.
