Review
THE GIRL NEXT DOOR
Starring Elisha Cuthbert, Emile Hirsch and Timothy Olyphant
Directed by Lunke Greenfield
Opens Friday, April 9
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Make no mistake, The Girl Next Door is an updated version of Risky Business, but instead of a prostitute we have a porn star. That’s about where the differences end and that’s a good thing. I liked Risky Business – it tapped into a culture of overachieving libidinous males who just wanted (in the end) to do the right thing.
Emile Hirsch plays the over-achieving Matthew, a do-gooder who can’t seem to break any of the rules. That is until he meets his naughty neighbor Danielle (Elisha Cuthbert). After a peeping Tom session goes hilariously awry, Danielle and Matthew become fast friends. He doesn’t know that the girl next door is a porn star ready to leave the business, but thanks to his skin-obsessed best friend Eli (a scene-stealing Chris Marquette), Matthew learns who Danielle really is (or was). Enter Kelly (Timothy Olyphant), a sleazy, maybe even dangerous, porn producer who still has big plans for Danielle. Oh dear, what’s a horny boy to do? Well, the right thing of course.
There are two things that make The Girl Next Door rise above the sea of mediocre teen flicks – throwing in a couple of surprise twists (including the rather ingenious ending) to the risky formula and the unapologetic way all the characters (especially Eli) interact and react with one another. This is a movie based in male fantasy that isn’t afraid of political correctness or the moral majority. That said, one of the films few flaws is the massive underdevelopment of Danielle’s character. Normally this would just drive me crazy, but I have to say I could easily see why both Matthew and the camera fall madly in love with her. Elisha Cuthbert has such great screen presence (which will no doubt translate into a solid future in movies) that her character works even without the benefit of development.
This is not a great movie – it could do with a little trimming of the almost-two-hour running time – but it is a really, really good one. At the least it’s a much better movie than you would expect given the subject matter and Hollywood’s waning obsession with really bad sex comedies.
The Girl Next Door could’ve easily been a shitty film. In fact, I think that in an earlier draft it was probably just another teensploitation flick. Something very interesting happened on the way to production – like someone saying: "Hey, I know. Let’s make Election instead of Eurotrip." And, they actually came kind of close. |
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