Brick (2005)
★★ — Brick (2005)
There's a version of Brick that works brilliantly. Hardboiled noir dropped into a Southern California high school, trench coats in the corridors, femmes fatales by the lockers, the whole Chandler-and-Hammett playbook transplanted somewhere it has absolutely no business being. That version sounds like a blast. What Rian Johnson actually made is something far more frustrating: a film so in love with its own concept that it forgets to be a good film.
Credit where it's due, the ambition is real. This is Johnson's debut feature and you can see what he was going for. The cast, led by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and including Lukas Haas and Noah Fleiss, commit to it entirely. Nobody's winking at the camera. Nobody's breaking to acknowledge how ridiculous it is that teenagers in a car park are talking like private eyes from a 1940s pulp novel. That commitment is admirable. And yet, here's the problem: the acting is bad. The cast are giving everything they've got and the delivery still lands wrong, stilted in a way that doesn't feel stylised so much as simply off. Commitment alone can't paper over that.
The dialogue is where Brick loses me most completely. I understand it's meant to be archaic, deliberately alien, a genre exercise in transplanting the language of noir. But there's a difference between dense and impenetrable, between evocative and exhausting. About twenty minutes in, I stopped following what people were actually saying to each other and started just waiting for scenes to end. When the language becomes a wall rather than a window, you've got a script that's confusing obscurity for intelligence. The plot underneath is already messy enough without the dialogue actively working against your ability to follow it.
And the thing is, proper noir isn't actually about complexity for its own sake. The best of the genre works because the moral stakes feel real, because the world is genuinely ambiguous, because the protagonist is compromised and you feel it. Brick has the visual vocabulary down well enough, the moody lighting, the rain-slicked pavement, the slow walks down empty hallways, but none of the emotional weight that makes those images mean something. It's all surface. You get atmosphere without soul, style without the substance to justify it.
Running close to two hours, the film drags considerably in its second half, when it should be pulling you in tighter. There's a version of this story that simmers, that builds. Instead, it meanders, piling on convolution as though that were the same thing as depth. I kept thinking about how Knives Out (2019) does something genuinely clever with genre, finding room inside a familiar structure for real wit and character. Brick is so busy being its own thing that it never stops to ask whether that thing is actually engaging to watch. And I say this as someone who went on to genuinely enjoy Johnson's later work, Looper (2012) being a good example of what happens when he pairs a high concept with storytelling that actually breathes.
There are people who love Brick, and I do get it on some level. If the concept clicks for you, if you're willing to lean in and let the language wash over you, I can see how it becomes something. But for me it stayed cold throughout. I never once felt the teen alienation it was gesturing at. I never cared about the central mystery. And despite the obvious effort going into every frame, I found myself unmoved by practically all of it.
An interesting idea, poorly executed. There's a reason it gets more admiration for its ambition than affection for its storytelling, and sitting through it, you feel that gap keenly. Style over substance, right down to the last rain-soaked frame.
Two stars.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2005 | Watched: 2026-02-27
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Rian Johnson: Knives Out (2019) · Looper (2012) · Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)
More with Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Inception (2010) · Looper (2012)
More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
More mystery: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · Carnival of Souls (1962) · One Way or Another (1975)
