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'Brick': Noir formula gets a savvy teenage twist

By STEVE MURRAY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Film noir gets a makeover in "Brick," a movie with a high-concept gimmick that works better than you'd expect.

Writer-director Rian Johnson's big idea? To transpose the tough-guy posturing, bad-girl vamping and stylized language of classic black-and-white films like "Out of the Past" and "The Maltese Falcon" to the present day. And shoot it in color. And set it in high school.

Focus Features

'Brick'

B+

The verdict: A neo-noir as cool as it is comic.

Director: Rian Johnson
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lukas Haas, Nora Zehetner, Emilie De Ravin, Noah Fleiss
Run time: 110 minutes
Release date: March 31, 2006
Rating: R for violent and drug content.

On the web
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View the trailer
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What sounds like a stunt, or a genre-mashup oddity like "Bugsy Malone," proves to be a sharp, tongue-in-cheek exercise, balancing deadpan menace with well-timed comedy.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays high schooler Brendan, our gumshoe stand-in searching for his ex-girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin), who's disappeared after falling in with the wrong crowd. That includes drugged-out kids like Dode (Noah Seagan) and sinister molls like Kara (Meagan Good), Brendan's duplicitous former flame who virtually lives in the high school theater's dressing room.

Then there's Laura (Nora Zehetner) an elegant tease of a party girl who offers to help Brendan's investigation. Bodies pile up, from bullet wounds and tainted drugs, as he tries to decipher the meaning of the words the hysterical Emily spoke to him in their last phone conversation: bad, brick, tug, pin.

You'll be deciphering things yourself as the movie immerses you in its neo-noir patois. Cops are called "bulls" and Brendan tells his detecting helpmate the Brain (Matt O'Leary), "Keep your specs peeled."

Watching "Brick," you need to keep your specs and your ears peeled as it wheels through a convoluted plot that plays out in phone booths, parking lots and a basement rec room that would look right at home in a David Lynch flick.

While Johnson unravels the mystery, he detonates a series of wry jokes, including the sight of Kara's lovesick boy-toys and Brendan's repeated, bloody abuse at the hands of thugs. And there's a laugh-out-loud moment involving a running bad guy and a stationary metal post.

What holds it all together is the pure, played-for-straight commitment everyone brings to the movie, especially Gordon-Levitt. He gets a strong assist from Lukas Haas in a cool, unnerving performance as a drug king who walks around looking like Barnabas Collins from "Dark Shadows." (He asks Brendan, in a beautifully bizarre non sequitur, "You read Tolkien?")

The only real weakness in "Brick" is its final scene, when the true puppeteer behind all the plot machinations is unmasked. The reveal is maybe a little too faithful to classic noirs; by this point, Johnson has earned the right to offer his own, unexpected spin to the end.

It's a small complaint about a movie that gives loving new life to a great, nearly forgotten genre. Maybe "Brick" will inspire younger viewers to discover the kind of movies that deployed dialogue nearly as cool and deadly as the guns and knives its characters used.