10 Movies That Would Make Better TV Shows

Rian Johnson’s directorial debut is a dense, intriguing film noir. Protagonist Brendan, a solitary misfit, investigates the whereabouts of his ex-girlfriend Emily, who’s fallen in with the wrong crowd. He’s a taciturn, brooding type who’s beaten up a lot, but gives as good as he gets - the perfect noir hero, in fact.

The twist? All the action takes place in and around high school. Brendan and Emily are teenagers. It would have been far easier to run the plot as a kind of knowing spoof on the genre, and it’s to his eternal credit that Johnson decided to play it completely straight.

But making the right decision to serve the story has a knock-on effect on the vibe of the film. Bruised and inscrutable, Brick feels sparse and claustrophobic despite the amount of dialogue-heavy scenes and the open-plan Californian setting. The elliptical narrative, so important in noir, is complicated further by the decision to include impenetrable slang that only properly becomes clear on a second viewing.

That’s an issue that a season of television could have fixed, giving the story space to breath. Not only that, but Brendan’s infiltration of local drug lord The Pin’s operation, vital to the plot, feels rushed and contrived in the context of the film. Brendan’s a ferociously compelling character, but he’s not exactly likeable: whatever the opposite of a silver tongue is, that’s what he’s got.

In the end, Brick feels like nothing so much as a season of True Detective, squeezed into a two hour movie. Resonant and resolutely odd, Johnson’s film could have made more of an impact had it been developed as a cable television show instead.