A Banal Risk

GENUINE RISK (1990)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"Genuine Risk" is a train wreck of a film, dependent on implausible coincidences and rampant gunfire than on building the mood of a genuine film noir. The opening has that promise and, for a while, we lurch along noir tropes such as the typical femme fatale, the screwed-up antihero who needs a job, the threatening big boss, and so on. But the filmmakers then decide to chuck it all to the demands of an overwrought melodrama. To end a noir picture with a car chase is to underestimate the audience.

There is the gambler and petty thief, Henry (Peter Berg) who always bets big and always loses. He lives in a small apartment above the town bar in Anywhere, USA. One night while playing pool, Henry sets his eyes on a mysterious woman (Michelle Johnson), simply known in the credits as the Girl, seen sitting at the bar (the kind of low-rent bar where a glamorous woman has no place). He asks her to his room for a free drink, and they almost have sex until her beeper sounds off. Henry has a beeper as well when he is offered by his childhood friend, Cowboy Jack (M.K. Harris), a job with the mob kingpin Paul Hellwart (Terence Stamp). Henry doesn't want the job, knowing it involves violence, but he takes it anyway. Eventually, we are privy to a bloody shootout, a fistfight involving a jockey, more sex, more bloody shootouts, etc.

The overall effect is not nauseating since the violence is punctual and explosive, but what is the point? Same with the sex scenes - Peter Berg and Michelle Johnson are attractive looking but they are barely believable as a pair of lovers. There is no real tension or sense of peril since the Girl and Hellwart's intentions are never clear - she is Hellwart's moll and carries a beeper and that is all we learn about her. As for Hellwart, we just learn he is mean, abusive and a former 60's British pop star! This thin material is written by Kurt Voss (who also directed), who wrote a similarly wafer-thin noir called "Delusion."

Most of "Genuine Risk" is superficial and glossy yet Terence Stamp rises above the material as the icy Hellwart. He has a great line about women and racetracks: "A racetrack is like a woman...a man weathers so much banality in pursuit of the occasional orgasmic moment." A great line in a movie full of cliched, banal line readings, uni-dimensional characters and the occasional orgasmic moment.