Risk

Great film. Stylish, cynical, very well made. Strong performances by the three leads make for a most enjoyable film, even if the characters are so unlikeable because of their mean and manipulative ways. Australian film-making is getting better and better.

Interesting city drama of insurance scam with a reasonable romance added as a diversion RISK offers watchable lanky local dude-actor Tom Long quite a good addition to his CV. Unfortunately it has Bryan Brown doing his usual Aussie slang laden yobbo bloke thing we cinema-goers have suffered through since COCKTAIL. Talking out of the side of his mouth and scowling...so tedious. The gorgeous Claudie Karvan however is the girl and she is always competent and easy to believe..perhaps it is her acting no matter what the material. The other star of this 'quite good' film is the city of Sydney itself and this stab at 'office block business' not often depicted in Australian movies is a fairly successful attempt at a Grisham style thriller. THE FIRM -ish in Sydney? Close. It did not have much of a release and probably looked to possible audiences like a TV movie which is certainly is not.

This film, about corruption in an insurance company, is a competent thriller, but somehow fails to rise to its potential.

It has a great cast. Tom Long is very good as the compassionate ingénue in the cynical world of insurance. Bryan Brown is also good as the wise old hand, who recognises Ben's (Long's) potential; and Claudia Karvan also plays the sexy tough lawyer with aplomb.

But somehow, this thriller failed to engage and to thrill, me at least. Somehow I couldn't care about the people. I did like the street scenes of familiar but little known parts of Sydney, often filmed with a fish-eye lens to increase the level of exotica.

But in the end, the film left me a little cold. Try Hell Has Harbour Views for a better attempt at this topic.

Risk is all about the three principals. Guy Pearce is fast becoming one of Hollywoods coming men, Bryan Brown is one of Hollywoods long standing token Australians, while Claudia Karven is not so well known beyond Australia's shores, but locally is a polished regular of Australian film.

Pearce makes a wonderfully naive 'bleeding heart' whose presence triggers a long standing scheme of Bryan Brown's, fully at home in the archetypal brash Ozzie male. Claudia Karven plays the other half of the scam, bringing with it the naked ambition that any scam needs to be motivated, and ultimately unravel, as well as bringing significant sexual tension to the plot, which is just one aspect of the developing relationship between the three central characters.

The plot itself is nothing new, the combination of spin and setting perhaps is.

It suffers slightly from the 'recognizably Australian' syndrome which plagues some Australian films, with Sydney Harbor, and particularly it's famous bridge squeezed into shot, sometimes for no other reason than to show us, hey this is Sydney!

The direction works for me, the soundtrack is not intrusive, there's a Porsche featured, which always adds to the looks of a film for me, but also the two younger stars show themselves off attractively for the cameras.

But what really drives the film is the clash between Brown's ruthlessness, Karven's ambition, and Pearce's straight man role, all mixed in with a dollop of fear, greed and lust.

See it, you'll enjoy.

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.