There is a recurring figure of speech in "Brick" in which Brendan, in persuading his friend to help him solve a murder, tells him to "keep your specs peeled" for such-and-such an event to occur.
High school kids have probably toughened up in the last few years, and I am positive that they speak in lingo that I am, at times, hard-pressed to comprehend on first hearing, but I know with certainty that they do not speak like Humphrey Bogart did in "The Big Sleep" or "The Maltese Falcon".
Yet in spite of this major conceit--that a bunch of high schoolers live in a world dominated by such characters as "The Pin" and "Tug", heavies who comport themselves like Sam Spade or even Don Corleone in spite of their mere 17 or 18 years on Earth--"Brick" is a rather fun piece of storytelling.
The plot is simple, and yet the filmmakers make it overly complicated, much in the vein of the films of the 1930-40s to which they aspire. Brendan (superbly played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) discovers his ex-girlfriend lying dead in a drainage ditch and launches a quest to uncover how and why she was murdered. That's pretty much all you need to know, but as with any good pot-boiler from Hollywood's Golden Era, the plot is far more complicated than it should be.
Suffice it to say that Brendan uncovers a ring of criminal activity headed by a rather mature high schooler, one so mature that, in spite (again) of his 17 or 18 years, he dresses in a robe-ish black outfit and is never seen not hunching over his walking cane. At one point in the movie, I wondered: did he, like Sir Wilfred in "Witness for the Prosecution", have a secret stash of cigars hidden in the shaft of that cane? And if not, then why exactly did he need it? Certianly not to help him get around--he's 17 for goodness' sake.
You get the idea. Imagine a young Sam Spade cutting his teeth while still in high school, and further imagine that he is magically transported to the 21st century to learn his craft before going back to the 1940s to live out the pinnacle of his detective career.
Well, that may sound like a harsh indictment, but "Brick" is a lot of fun, provided you can get past the bizarre stylization employed by writer-director Rian Johnson in recreating a mid-20th century piece of classic Hollywood storytelling.
