FAR TOO MANY MALL-RAT MOLLS IN `BRICK'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

If Dashiell Hammett were an Orange County high-school student, he might have written something like "Brick." Or so the film's writer-director Rian Johnson would like us to believe.

A convoluted but, in the end, not very complex teenage murder mystery, "Brick" cops the lingo and the hard-boiled attitude of the great 1930s and '40s detective novels. It's a marvelously smart and literary conceit. I just wish it worked better than it does.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Brendan, whose missing ex-girlfriend has left some cryptic, disturbing phone messages. Obsessed with discovering what happened to her, Brendan strongarms and wisecracks his way through an increasingly unbelievable underworld of suburban drug merchants, junior-varsity femmes fatales and hair-trigger palookas.

Brendan is beaten, jerked around and blackmailed repeatedly, yet sticks to his investigation with humorless, single-minded doggedness. Raymond Chandler wouldn't have approved; he would have made it funnier (and, perhaps, the master of stylized dialogue would have written a less-talky script, too).

And while the anachronistic vernacular that keeps dribbling out of the contemporary mall rats' mouths isn't all that hard to accept, their mature-beyond-their-years' capacity to plot and scheme doesn't wash.

There's an upcoming movie, "Alpha Dog," that captures suburban Southern California teen criminality in at least as baroque, but far more persuasive, a way than "Brick" does. Of course, that was not Johnson's agenda, and it would be negligent to ignore the great amount of artistry that's gone into "Brick." But that's resulted in an art object that can only be admired for its technique, rather than as a movie that draws you into its own uniquely defined world.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

BRICK - Two and one half stars

(R: violence, drug use, sex, language, children in jeopardy)

Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lukas Haas, Nora Zehetner, Noah Fleiss, Emilie de Ravin.

Director: Rian Johnson.

Running time: 1 hr. 50 min.

Playing: ArcLight, Hollywood.

In a nutshell: Contemporary teen crime drama written in an old-fashioned, hard-boiled style is too literary for its own good.

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A high-school student (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) becomes consumed with finding his girlfriend (Emilie de Raving) after she goes missing in the teenage murder mystery ``Brick.''