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Parents' Guide to

Risky Business

By Charles Cassady Jr., Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 16+

'80s classic is filled with sex, cursing, and smoking.

Movie R 1983 98 minutes
Risky Business Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Community Reviews

age 16+

Based on 5 parent reviews

age 16+

A seething satire on capitalism and the long con

A seething satire on capitalism and the long con. Who is conning who? Who is innocent? And who deserves being conned? These questions and more are posed but not answered. I was not super interested in the film (although Cruise's performance is engaging) until the end and then a lot of things fell into place. The temptation of a "happy ending" is less what occurred rather than an oblique attempt at what "back to normal" is. Writer and Director Brickman masterfully pieces this together and the actors deftly portray ALL of the cons.
age 17+

Risky Business

Movie opens up with a nude woman in the shower. The entire movie is about prostitution and making risky decisions when their parents are out of town.

This title has:

Too much sex
Too much drinking/drugs/smoking

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say (5 ):
Kids say (12 ):

This dated but appealing comedy is so much more than just a bunch of dirty jokes in the locker room. Though RISKY BUSINESS arrived with a busload of D-grade teen-sex comedies inspired by Porky's (and a young Tom Cruise had even starred in one of them, the little-remembered Losin' It), critics immediately recognized that this was a much smarter, sharper dark comedy about American values in the 1980s. Joel (who also belongs to a school-age business group called Future Enterprises) is like the nice, well-bred kid next door who attains personal and professional rewards not through the traditional paperboy route, but through vice. The lesson at the end is that, yes, this is the way the game is played, even if the "respectable" adult world pretends otherwise.

The question for parents is whether kids watching this perverted Horatio Alger story will comprehend that it was meant to be a commentary on Reagan-era greed and upper-class criminality.

Movie Details

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