Review of Brick (2006) by Rick R — 11 Jun 2014

Brick (2006).

I love hard-boiled detective movies, as well as film noir. Rian Johnson has done an excellent job of writing and directing this wild mix of both, as well as a teen movie. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Brendan, a high school loner who wants to get back with his old girlfriend, Emily (Emile De Ravin) but she insists that she's found somebody new.

Soon, Brendan finds her lying dead in a drainage ditch. There's a classroom full of suspects, as well as him. Brendan, with the help of of the class brain (Matt O'Leary), has got to weasel his way around the Vice Principle (Richard Roundtree), the police, and a dangerous drug dealer, The Pin (Lukas Haas) to find out who killed Emily and get even with the guy who did this. There's even several femme fatales thrown in for good measure.

This is an independent film, so the sound isn't the greatest. The kids talk with a weird mix of modern teen lingo and the film noir slang of those 1930s/1940s movies. I really had to throw on the closed captioning on the DVD to understand some of what they were saying. Other than that, it's a great movie, plus, there's the usual twist and turns that comes with a good mystery. It's well worth you seeing.