Risk

This film is not the greatest ever made, but it is watchable. I liked the fact that it gave me a bit of an inside look the insurance industry and how it operates. The performances by the three lead actors were satisfactory, nothing brilliant though. Just a note - Guy Pearce was not in the film, it was Tom Long!

I just saw this movie at the Toronto Film Festival, And I have to say that this is by far the best movie that i have seen in a long time. The performances by the three key players are dead on, and the direction is flawless. It is just too bad that this movie hasn't found a distributer for North America.

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.

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.