Brick is enjoyable, postmodern, and clever. The story surrounds Brendan, a hard-boiled loner with a shady past, playing detective to track down what happened to his ex-girlfriend Emily. Splicing teen drama with classic film noir, it introduces us to backstabbing student relationships and guides us through the claustrophobic halls of high school and suburbia.
It is interesting how easily the two genres fit together. True, the traditional teen genre usually tends to take a romantic angle where the unpopular protagonist is transformed and gets their crush in the end. But this common practice in films like 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), Mean Girls (2004) and Pretty in Pink (1986), could be considered somewhat akin to the romances that traditional film noir stood in contrast to. And this is what makes Brick long overdue.
Traditional archetypes associated with both genres come together very nicely in the film. With the principle, jerks, drama girls, and nerds being perfectly suited to fill in for the police, thugs, actresses, and eccentric geniuses. Of particular note, Brendan might well be first teen loner that we've seen fight back against jerks (with his fists) and talk back at the principle; and the female lead of Laura has all the hallmarks of the classic femmes fatale.
In terms of plot, Brick has more in common with noir than teen comedy, with stalking sequences and a mysterious object at the centre of the story, as one finds in the likes of The Maltese Falcon (1941) or Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Brick, is both valuable and dangerous, as a clump of quality cocaine. A tad conventional perhaps, and clearly these kids are out of their depth, but the way the director has run with the characters and pushed them to their utmost extreme has proven effective.
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