Brick - 16th May 2006

Brick was an attempt to relocate a film noir story to an American high school and, in my opinion, I'm afraid it failed quite miserably. In trying to mesh together two very different genres it fell between two stools, it was neither one thing nor the other and it just seemed wrong.

One of the main problems was the main protagonist Brendan, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He was not empathetic enough to be a hero, nor did he have sufficient charisma to be an anti-hero as found in most film noir movies. All he seemed to do was regard everyone with a blank face and mumble things in a monotone. We did not see enough of the character to understand his motivations, and as a result I couldn't really care if he managed to solve this mystery or not.

Perhaps partly because of the above I was not engaged at all with the plotline. There was never enough suspense and ultimately I didn't really care that much as to how it all turned out.

A minor thing was the setting and the colour of the film. I kind of assumed that film noir should be, well, noir. I don't think the dusty, sun-bleached desert and concrete that provided a constant back-drop to the film could ever compete with the shadowy city streets of a traditional film noir flick.

The costumes were quite well done though. All the male characters wore an outfit which signified their place in the scheme of things (the football player, the Pin in his suit) and kept this costume throughout the whole film. The female characters wore brilliant clothes; the scene towards the end when Brendan confronts the actress girl in full hair and make-up was fantastic. And the other girl (Laura?) took her status as resident femme fatale very seriously and played it quite well. It was a bit annoying that Brendan wore the same baggy jeans and scruffy jacket all the way through though, he could have bothered to get changed sometime.

The film wasn't terrible but it just seemed a little disappointing because it could have been done so much better. Overall it gets: 5