Pun Salad

This is a conscious effort to bring the old Spade/Marlowe private-eye flick into the 21st century. The result is bizarre and fun.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, famous for playing Tommy Solomon in 3rd Rock from the Sun, appears here as a high school student whose ex-girlfriend has been murdered. The genre insists that he play the knight errant, venturing into the mean streets of San Clemente, California, to bring justice upon the wrongdoers. Just as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, he needs to consort with a bad element, dish out some fisticuffs, have fisticuffs dished out upon him, and, above all, maintain his stoicism and the ability to crack wise. There's also "the stuff that dreams are made of," in this case a high-value brick of heroin that nobody seems to be able to hang onto for long, and might be cut with poison.

Lukas Haas, the cute Amish kid from Witness, appears as a menacing drug dealer. He still has the big eyes and unusual skull shape, but their effect here is to make him creepy.

Also appearing in a small role: Richard Roundtree, the original Shaft! And he's still a bad mother- [shut your mouth!—ed. I'm only talkin' about Richard Roundtree!]

Everyone speaks hyper-elliptically in what I assume is supposed to be the patois of your typical California high school drug culture, mixed with Hammett/Chandler tough-guyisms. ("The ape blows, or I clam.") It's kind of amusing trying to figure out what they really mean; but even if you do, it doesn't matter too much, because everyone lies a lot too. Subtitles are a must, because it wouldn't do to play these characters as if they just stepped out of elocution class; there's a lot of mumbling and fast-talking.

By the way: I hardly ever get brand new DVDs, but Blockbuster Online really came through this time, delivering this to my door on the very same day of its scheduled release. Good for them.