Movie Review – Brick (2005)

Whether you like “Brick” or not depends on how old you are and how familiar you are with the venerable movie genres of the past because this is a prize-winner “detective story” that appropriates film noir conventions and Dashiell Hammett’s artistic sensibility to tell a totally inappropriate story.

Just like the Rubic Cube image that flashes in one scene, this is an “engineered” film, put together as a self-conscious project to appeal to the post-X-gen sea of high school neurosis while making it look like high art.

The result is as strange and off-kilter as listening to a buttoned-down business presentation sang to the tune of a Japanese Kabuki theater!

It is jarring, disconcerting and a source of two hour long cognitive dissonance.

“This can’t be!” you keep saying to yourself in scene after scene while the miscast and misdirected saga continues to undulate like a clever sleight-of-hand trick. It is too transparent for comfort.

In a nutshell: a high school “private eye” gumshoe (suspend your disbelief for a second) tries to find the killer of his girl friend through solving the mystery of four seemingly nonsensical words.

That’s it.

But the hero, a bespectacled mop-haired introspective high school nerd, is no Phil Marlow. Right there, from the get go, the genre is violated. It is as weird as a "Boris Karloff comedy."

Second, it is obvious that this is the story of a bunch of kids who have no jobs and are supported by generous parents.

What kind of a “film noir” is it in which both the hero, his side kick, and his nemesis are all supported by their parents!?

It’s like a parody of a film noir, except it isn’t and has already won a special prize at Sundance! Go figure.

Perhaps you should rent “American Graffiti” tonight if you’d like to remember how it felt to be in high school? Yes, it is an old fashioned ‘50s flick but at least the language, the emotions and the inner realities are true and genuine. At least it does not appropriate a language from a totally unrelated genre while trying to be cute, interesting, and “creative.”

It goes to show that not every hyped up “prize winner” is worthy of your time.

A disappointing 3 out of 10.

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