Brick review

My latest Netflix rental was the 2005 release Brick. Written and directed by Rian Johnson (his first full-length feature), the film garnered a lot of attention at last year’s Sundance Film Festival when it won the Special Jury Prize. The film is based on a very simple but unique idea. Take a genre and lift the dialogue, mood and characterizations and place it in an entirely new setting. In this case, Johnson took a typical Noir-ish, gumshoe story and set it in the present day with high school kids filling the roles of tough guys, femme fatales, gangsters and informants.
Needless to say, the concept works very well. Lead tough guy Brendan, played perfectly by Joesph Gordon-Levitt, gets a mysterious phone call from an ex-girlfriend, she sounds scared and seems to want help. He sets off to find out wants she’s gotten into and enlists the help of The Brain, a local know-it-all.
The story has its twists and turns and you have fun watching the classic roles of ‘the muscle’ and ‘crime lord’ filled by such boyish faces. My only issue with the story is that I didn’t care how it ended; it was more fun to just watch the variety of characters. It felt like they slapped on a generic Maltese Falcon like speech at the end that sort of made sense. But it is still a very well-crafted movie and I highly recommend it for fans of 30s and 40s Noir fans.

My next Netflix review will be of Infernal Affairs, the Hong Kong cop thriller that Scorsese has remade and is releasing this October as "The Departed".