High School Confidential

I think it was Brandi Brown who I first heard about The Kid Detective (2020) from. The premise sounds great: an Encyclopedia Brown style kid detective grows up, but can't move on from kid-detectiving. Then he has a real case. It was supposed to be funny, then get dark. All true.

Adam Brody plays the grown-up kid. We meet him hungover, getting woken up by a call from work - he thought it was Sunday, but it isn't. We get a flashback of his childhood cases, solving the case of who robbed a locker (the bully who is allergic to peanuts, because he didn't steal the Reeses) and so forth. He even finds a hit and run driver. That prompts the town to give him an office to work out of. He charged two quarters a case. Then a girl, a close friend, vanishes. He tries to track her down, but can't. Even though he's only 12 he feels responsible. He never does solve that case. Maybe that's where it all went wrong.

But when he gets to his office, his no-fucks-given secretary. tells him he has a customer. It's high-school student Sophie Nellise, who wants him to find out who killed her boyfriend. He was a top-of-his-class boy scout, with no known enemies, but Brodie warns her that she might not like what he finds out. But she asks him to go ahead. Even though she can't pay (and he is desperately broke), he feels like he has to go ahead.

So begins the investigation. This is similar to Brick - high school noir, but without the snappy patter. They find a picture of a nude girl in a tiger mask in one of his books and find out that he was having an affair with a slightly older high-school semi-hooker ("His girlfriend is cute, but I'm complicated"). He was also dealing drugs - a confidence-building ego enhancer - which Brodie tests, giving him a enough courage to interrogate the local teen bad kids, and almost enough to talk to the local biker gang, including the one with the peanut allergy. who has a grudge against him. He also breaks into a kids house and gets trapped in the closet of his 9 year old sister - then getting discovered. It's mostly very humiliating. 

In fact, he spends most of the movie bowed down under the weight of failure and self-loathing. His parents are still supporting him, but just barely. The local merchants look at him with disgust. The police and high-school principal tolerate him for his past glories, but just barely.

And then he solves the case. I won't give it away, but it is probably a lot worse than you guess. He even manages to solve the case of the missing girl. He is once more beloved. His parents now respect him. He cleans up his apartment. And in the final shot, he breaks down, sobbing uncontrollably. 

I'm not sure I can explain that last shot. But I imagine that it has something to do with the choice between being a drunken loser, and seeing the world for all its naked depravity. Some comedy, huh?