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Brick (Rain Johnson)
Overly stylized unholy mishmash of The Maltese Falcon, "Beverly Hills 90210", Blue Velvet and Encyclopedia Brown that holds your attention but doesn't add up to much. Set in a Los Angeles High School where apparently nobody ever has to go to class, Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Mysterious Skin, "3rd Rock from the Sun") is Brendan Frye, a moody, self-isolating kid who mopes around pining for Emily (Emilie de Ravin), the girl that dumped him a few months ago. She frantically calls him one day to say she's in trouble and has fallen in with the wrong crowd, but before he can ask for details they're cut off. She shows up two days later dead, and Brendan plays detective to infultrate the criminal element around the school, find some answers and scrape some knuckles. There's a young kingpin (Lukas Haas), his loose canon muscle (Noah Fleiss), a mysterious junior femme fatale (Nora Zehetner), a buddy called The Brain helping him gain the info (Matt O'Leary) and various other minor losers and druggies.
The dialogue is thick and stylized like a Dashiell Hammett novel. Everybody drops in bygone slang like "gat" and "yeg" and "hop" and "shamus" and uses "gum" and "heel" as verbs without batting an eyelash (as in sentences like 'That yeg's flashing a gat that's gonna gum up the works, let's heel it'). The best of these scenes is when Brendan is called in to the Vice Principal's (Richard Roundtree) office, and they have a fast-paced give-and-take that might just as well be Bogie trying to stall a Police Lieutenant while he conducts his investigation. But for every one of the few times this style works and is amusing, there are six or eight scenes where it is just extraneous and silly. But it's indicitive of what's right and wrong with Brick.
The mystery itself isn't especially compelling, and with only a few characters interacting with each other it's not difficult to figure out where the double crosses are coming from. Gordon-Levitt does have fun in the lead as the smart, cynical, deadpan, wisecracking teenage tough guy, Haas has turned from a cute child actor into an odd looking young adult which serves him well for the theatrical cape-wearing The Pin (short for Kingpin...get it?), and Zehetner is fine as the piano-playing dame with the smoky voice who is a dangerous beauty...even if she looks like she probably only has her learner's permit. But this is all style and no substance. The style carries it here and there, but it needed more grouding or at least something new to say instead of dressing up Hammett in a Tommy Hilfiger ad. The scene where the ominous interrogation of Brendan is interrupted by the Pin's "Leave it to Beaver" mother trying to offer the houseguest food and drink is the kind of comic self-aware mix that might have yielded better results. Instead most of the movie is just kids walking around pretending they're all in a Bogart movie without any of the characters or the filmmaker ever noting how absurd it is.
They simply don't pull it off enough...though something tells me this could very well become the next Donnie Darko. Or at least the next Boondock Saints. I have a feeling sixteen-year-olds who don't know a (Sam) Spade from a (Mike) Hammer are going to groove to the style and latch on to this one, regardless of how derivitive and hollow it really is. They'd be better served renting The Glass Key (1942), The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Asphalt Jungle (1950) instead. Shane Black had much more fun and success with his playfully witty deconstruction of the genre in last year's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. And take a look at River's Edge (1986) for a much more interesting and powerful look at a bunch of High Schoolers and a dead girl's body.
GRADE: C+
Brick (Rain Johnson)
Overly stylized unholy mishmash of The Maltese Falcon, "Beverly Hills 90210", Blue Velvet and Encyclopedia Brown that holds your attention but doesn't add up to much. Set in a Los Angeles High School where apparently nobody ever has to go to class, Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Mysterious Skin, "3rd Rock from the Sun") is Brendan Frye, a moody, self-isolating kid who mopes around pining for Emily (Emilie de Ravin), the girl that dumped him a few months ago. She frantically calls him one day to say she's in trouble and has fallen in with the wrong crowd, but before he can ask for details they're cut off. She shows up two days later dead, and Brendan plays detective to infultrate the criminal element around the school, find some answers and scrape some knuckles. There's a young kingpin (Lukas Haas), his loose canon muscle (Noah Fleiss), a mysterious junior femme fatale (Nora Zehetner), a buddy called The Brain helping him gain the info (Matt O'Leary) and various other minor losers and druggies.
The dialogue is thick and stylized like a Dashiell Hammett novel. Everybody drops in bygone slang like "gat" and "yeg" and "hop" and "shamus" and uses "gum" and "heel" as verbs without batting an eyelash (as in sentences like 'That yeg's flashing a gat that's gonna gum up the works, let's heel it'). The best of these scenes is when Brendan is called in to the Vice Principal's (Richard Roundtree) office, and they have a fast-paced give-and-take that might just as well be Bogie trying to stall a Police Lieutenant while he conducts his investigation. But for every one of the few times this style works and is amusing, there are six or eight scenes where it is just extraneous and silly. But it's indicitive of what's right and wrong with Brick.
The mystery itself isn't especially compelling, and with only a few characters interacting with each other it's not difficult to figure out where the double crosses are coming from. Gordon-Levitt does have fun in the lead as the smart, cynical, deadpan, wisecracking teenage tough guy, Haas has turned from a cute child actor into an odd looking young adult which serves him well for the theatrical cape-wearing The Pin (short for Kingpin...get it?), and Zehetner is fine as the piano-playing dame with the smoky voice who is a dangerous beauty...even if she looks like she probably only has her learner's permit. But this is all style and no substance. The style carries it here and there, but it needed more grouding or at least something new to say instead of dressing up Hammett in a Tommy Hilfiger ad. The scene where the ominous interrogation of Brendan is interrupted by the Pin's "Leave it to Beaver" mother trying to offer the houseguest food and drink is the kind of comic self-aware mix that might have yielded better results. Instead most of the movie is just kids walking around pretending they're all in a Bogart movie without any of the characters or the filmmaker ever noting how absurd it is.
They simply don't pull it off enough...though something tells me this could very well become the next Donnie Darko. Or at least the next Boondock Saints. I have a feeling sixteen-year-olds who don't know a (Sam) Spade from a (Mike) Hammer are going to groove to the style and latch on to this one, regardless of how derivitive and hollow it really is. They'd be better served renting The Glass Key (1942), The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Asphalt Jungle (1950) instead. Shane Black had much more fun and success with his playfully witty deconstruction of the genre in last year's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. And take a look at River's Edge (1986) for a much more interesting and powerful look at a bunch of High Schoolers and a dead girl's body.
GRADE: C+