The characters speak English but they may as well be speaking obstructed code. Speech, slang and language deliberately cryptic, inflected with a ponderous style you're supposed to vibe with, not make sense of. Because this is a transposition of old school noir to a modern high school setting, trying to understand the plot was never the point. Sure, there's a skeleton of a plot involving a seedy world of teenage crime, but a successful noir isn't one that can be snapped into swift intellectual form. It's about atmosphere, mood and dialogue that can't be followed, only felt, and is probably only appreciated by hardboiled fans of the genre. 

You never really get used to the slipperiness of the language, you just sorta float on it till it numbs you with its sophisticated artificiality. Every now and then you glimpse a piece of the puzzle, only to realize you're chasing after red herrings that were never meant to be connected. 

You can try to play detective and piece together the esoteric politics and the cabalistic motives for why a young woman's body lies dead in an underground tunnel, but again, that's not really the point. It doesn't really matter how this character might be connected to that character, or how this cover-up relates to that betrayal, or how that guy double crossed his boss which may have led to the murder of this other girl. It actually doesn't matter what becomes of these characters either because we're never really made to care about the overly complicated game they're playing. Ebert gets it right: "Because we can't believe in the characters, we can't care about their fates. They have lifestyles, not lives." Kids transposing as adults and taking their lives as seriously is a truthful conceit, but the presentation of this conceit creates more distance than resonance. Apart from being a well-constructed homage to a very convoluted genre, BRICK really doesn't have much to say. It's a successful example of style that leans deep into its studied artifices but spends way too much time telling me things. The words sound cute spilling out of the mouths of its characters, but it all leads to a meaningless succession of actions and consequences that can't avoid feeling obtuse and deadening. The film is a chore to sit through, not a spell that puts you under.