Dead body, right off the bat. It’s gonna be a real page-turner, or at least that’s a term that could be used if this were a book. But it is obviously not. Because, you know, watching on the TV and all. This may be in color and widescreen aspect ratio and centered in a high school, but this is straight-up a hard-boiled detective story, complete with 50’s faced-paced dialogue and all kinds of lingo to make your head spin.
This is basically a murder mystery so the less you know going in the better. First scene starts with Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) obviously distraught as he sees the dead body of a girl in a waterway. Jump back a tad, he’s a high school loner-type and seems to have connections across many a social strata. He uses his keen mind and apparently his somewhat shady social connections to first try and find his distraught ex-girlfriend, and then to find who killed her.
This is kind of a weird amalgamation between The River’s Edge, Twin Peaks and Chinatown (sorry, I just watched it again and it's kinda stuck in the noggin). But as much as I liked the whip-smart dialogue, it just didn’t quite match the environment. Using the high school as a framing device and its cliques and power structures inherent within, that could’ve worked really spectactularly well with a slightly different handling maybe? Here, it’s still good, just a bit too far of a stretch to drape this over that kind of setting. Otherwise it is a decent detective flick in a modern setting, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt doing a great job with the primary role. Score seems to fit it in that slightly-off Chinatown kinda vibe, and it sure looks damn purty if not a bit muted in the color palette. Great initial feature film by Rian Johnson, and minus that Star Wars movie he inexplicably did, some decent enough other films like Looper and Knives Out as different kinds of Investigation movies in very different trappings. His couple of gigs directing some Breaking Bad episodes didn’t suck, either.
