You get a call from an old flame, she’s in trouble and she needs your help. You start nosing around but when she turns up dead you really start getting serious. You’ve got a source, a guy who knows who the big players are, you tell him to keep his ear to the ground. He steers you to the local drug lord, your old flame was playing with fire it seems. You’ve had run ins with the authorities in the past and when they try and put the squeeze on you, you throw them a bone…if they let you play things your way you’ll make sure they don’t regret it. So you stir things up in the hopes of flushing out the killer…
‘50s film noir? Nope, this is Brick a film made in 2005 that takes all the key noir elements and transplants them to a modern day California high school. Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is our loner hero looking to find whoever killed his high school sweetheart. The crime kingpin is played by Lukas Haas (yep the kid from Witness grew up to be a drug dealer!) while the authority figure is none other than Shaft himself Richard Roundtree, not playing a cop but the school’s Assistant Vice Principle. There’s even an alluring femme fatale, played by Nora Zehetner, who worms her way into our hero’s affections but you just know she’s got her own hidden agenda.
