The hero, Ben, is not so much a man as a man-shaped jellyfish. Maybe the plot requires him to do almost anything anyone else asks of him, but he could at least do so with some attitude - not necessarily "attitood", in the American sense; I'd merely like him to have some point of view or other towards his own spinelessness. (As Jack Lemmon does in "The Apartment". Maybe I would have enjoyed "Risk" more if I hadn't seen "The Apartment" a few hours earlier.) He could at the very least have been aware of it. But his character is so completely amorphous that it comes as a shock to hear him narrating events. The character we see on screen is scarcely capable of forming sentences, let alone using them to express ideas. And the heroine is a similarly empty creation. (I winced when the two of them fell for each other; they seemed to be doing it simply because the film noir genre required it. This is NOT a remake of "Double Indemnity", but someone evidently thought that it was.)
The gimmick behind the story is a good one and the direction is uninspired without being flawed in any particular way (at least, not obviously); had the central characters been characters, perhaps it might have worked well enough.
