Why are so many people complaining that it's not 'realistic'?
It's crazy seeing so many people here complaining that it would have been a good movie if it had adults instead of high school kids, because high school kids don't talk like that, dress like that, or be in those situations.
THAT WAS THE ENTIRE POINT.
That was blindingly obvious from the get-go. It's not an art house film, nor is it meant to be one of those deep nonsensical postmodernist films where you spend weeks arguing with other people what the meaning of it was. It's really not.
This is noir. The kind of movies your parents and your grandparents used to watch. Heck you probably just finished watching one with 2013's Gangster Squad. A 1940s cops, gangsters, and detectives story. It's a fairly simple mystery story where everything becomes clear at the end.
Try it. Close your eyes. Replace every single character in this movie with a character from a gangster movie in your mind and it's basically the same film. The dialogue, the music, the mannerisms... everything can be replaced by a standard character of a noir film.
Brendan is the tough no-nonsense detective out for revenge. Emily is his past love who fell into the wrong crowd. The Brain is his sidekick. The Pin is the resident Mafia boss, and Tugger is his right hand man who secretly resents his boss. Kara and Dode are small-time criminals. VP Trueman is the mayor. And Nora is the mysterious femme fatale.
The thing that makes the movie enjoyable is exactly because what you're actually seeing clashes with what you think you should be seeing. It looks like a modern high school drama but you keep wondering why you keep imagining fedora hats, tommy guns, and dark city alleys.
Sure, you may not like that kind of thing. But please, stop complaining that it was too unbelievable.