Brick

Title: Brick
Rating: 3/5
Genre: Crime, Thriller, Mystery, Film-Noir
Starring: Joseph Gordan-Levitt, Nora Zehetner

An unknown director, a cast of unknowns, and yet a plot idea that couldn’t keep me away; this is no mystery story of ‘who did it,’ but rather uniquely utilising a high school as the backdrop, and those within it as the main protagonists. The manner this was done was not to make it seem ‘smaller,’ or to diminish the characters intellect but rather to provide a change of scenery for a murder-mystery plot that had seen itself worked too many times. Unfortunately, this film probably would have been better without it.

It is that fateful day when Brendan (Gordan-Levitt) receives a phone call from an old flame asking for his help, filled with words he didn’t understand and clearly in distress he sets out to explore just what happened. With the help of ‘Brain’ (Matt O’Leary) it isn’t long before he finds her dead along the riverbank. Determined to find out what happened, he soon finds himself caught up in a situation of bad drug deals, big bosses and their hired muscle and the mysterious femme fatale (Nora Zehetner). Mixing neo-noir with teen drama the result is as much ‘Donnie Darko’ as it is ‘Get Carter,’ and as promising as it sounds the reality is a film that doesn’t entirely fit.

The acting is in no way to blame for this; indeed the character played by Gordan-Levitt was worked marvellously, previously only known for his work in “3rd Rock from the Sun,” he performs the serious role better than I could have predicted. Matched with the femme fatale her drab and un-spirited performance lends the final scene much confusion as we suddenly realise there was intended to be some form of sexual tension in the prior scenes. The show partly stolen by the character of ‘Tug’ (Noah Fleiss), the simple-minded muscle which we soon learn isn’t so simple-minded; its little coincidence that his presence lends itself to many of the strongest scenes prevalent here. The main issue presented here is not the acting which performed amicably throughout, instead it’s the direction.

The use of a wholly unfitting, almost folk-like soundtrack simply felt out of place, as did much of the dialogue. Filled with buzzwords and slang that would perhaps make sense in a gangster film, beyond the fact that these are mere students caught up in a world they don’t belong to, the simple matter of fact is that the dialogue is spoken quickly, and with the constant influx of ‘bad bricks,’ ‘Coffee and Pie,’ ‘I’ve got Knives in my eyes,’ whilst poetic in a manner, comes so thick and fast that keeping up is a chore, even for the most observant who catalogues an internal phrasebook from the one point in the film they are explained. At many points I stumbled as to just what was going on, and it wasn’t until further on that I finally pieced together what was occurring. Even many of the snappy retorts come off as mediocre at best, and cringe-worthy at their worst. Yelling at your principal to ‘let me go or suspend me,’ simply doesn’t carry the same weight as the way gangster films did it.

Furthermore, the notion of utilising students presents itself once more as we finally meet the man behind the curtain, running the show and playing people off like pawns; a man robbed of being capable of providing any form of tension the second he was played for laughs. And yet despite this, the subtle clues dropped from the offset all piece together in the end, the – whilst uninspiring – cinematography making it apparent the clues we are intended to pick up on in order to attempt to piece it together for ourselves. This film, shot on a relatively low budget, has succeeded in making a convoluted plot make sense by the end without feeling compromised by a lack of funds. It was a highly ambitious effort that comes off as a failed attempt to recreate a film-noir classic in a modern setting, perhaps worth seeking out for its unconventionality, but perhaps better left alone for those looking for something else.