Brick
2005
**½
Director: Rian Johnson
Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Nora Zehetner, Emilie de Ravin, Noah Fleiss, Matt O'Leary, Richard Roundtree, Lukas Haas
In his directorial debut Rian Johnson boldly takes an archetypal film noir premise and adapts it to a modern-day high school setting. The hero is a quiet, bespectacled teenager who cannot get over his ex. When he finds her killed, he's determined to seek out the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it may be. The dark story is peppered with typically hardboiled dialogue, and apart from the laconic hero, there is a beautiful femme fatale, a ruthless crime boss and his trigger-happy muscleman. The concept is original and it results in some darkly comic scenes, like the one in which the kingpin's mother casually serves cereal to the beat-up hero. However, the mystery that drives the plot is confusing, overdramatic, anachronistic and long, and the film as a whole doesn't amount to much more than a clever-clever stylistic exercise.
